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I have posted previously regarding a similar problem but now I've managed to get a bit further following various tutorials and solutions of others, not being sure of what's really going on though or the fact that it's quite a tailor made situation.

You can find a link below of the boot-repair url chucked out after I tried to restore the MBR.

http://paste.ubuntu.com/7018148/

Background Info

  • I have an SSD with windows 7 and a HDD with Ubuntu 13.10
  • Currently booting using grub2 (I believe, the background is purple if thats what makes it 2)(I would like to boot from my SSD, but at the moment getting windows to work any way possible is fine with me)

Recent Trials

  • I have tried changing the bios settings to make SSD top of list; windows says BOOTMGR is missing
  • The windows repair CD doesn't allow me to repair the boot
  • I tried doing something along the lines of this tutorial here!

I'm sure theres a solution. Out of fear of having damaged my windows drive all the files are still there so I would like to believe my installation process was correct. I created partitions on the 2nd drive as per standards so as to have:

  • a boot partition
  • a root partition
  • a normal space
  • a linux-swap
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You damaged Windows, but it is easily repairable from Windows repairCD or flash drive if you have one.

When you installed Windows, was the other drive the boot drive in BIOS? Windows installs its boot partition, typically 100MB and hidden in Windows to the drive that is the boot drive in BIOS. And that partition has boot flag (active partition) so Windows knows which partition to boot from.

But you do not have to have separate Windows boot partition. But you are missing bootmgr and the BCD. If you run Windows repairs on your Windows NTFS partition that should add those. Be sure to first set Windows drive as BIOS boot drive or Windows repairs may put a new boot partition into sdb, and since it does not see Linux partitions and rewrites partition table will destroy Linux on sdb.

Grub does not use boot flag, but some BIOS will not let you boot without boot flag on a primary partition. I would suggest moving boot flag from sdb5 to sdb1, but that is not related and may not be required.

After you fix Windows, reset BIOS to boot from sdb. Boot into Ubuntu and run this and it will add Windows to grub menu. And if any issues you can directly boot Windows on sda from BIOS or one time boot key.

sudo update-grub
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  • yeah thanks, I did try this but my CD doesn't have a repair option, well it doesn't allow me to get to it, but that's a different issue which I'll address later. Staying on topic, I recall that my laptop came with the drive already installed with windows 7 and the other SSD drive is the one I newly put windows 7 on with the repair disk the laptop came with. There was a few issues sometimes with the booting of the SSD drive but I never paid too much attention to it. It might be that the original HDD had all the boot information which I obviously ignorantly got rid of during the ubuntu install.
    – user3012749
    Mar 1, 2014 at 22:10

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