[Noisebridge-discuss] Can Someone Help Me with My MBR?

Chrysanthemum Hyphus c at hyph.us
Tue Jan 17 04:16:50 UTC 2012


Hi All,

Thank you both for responding to me!

Unfortunately, booting from any other device *just doesn't work*, no matter
how I set the BIOS. I made a repair disk myself from this installation,
from which I tried booting. I tried downloading, and booting from a generic
Windows 7 repair disk image which I burned to CD on my Mac. I tried booting
from a CD and then a USB flash drive containing Fedora.

Both the DVD drive and the flash drive are recognized by the BIOS, and I
set both of them to boot before the hard drive (and these settings are
preserved across power-downs), and it just keeps coming back to me with
wanting a Windows 7 installation disk, which I don't have, of course,
because Windows 7 came pre-installed.

The built-in system restore (provided in lieu of an installation disk)
system's OS repair option restored WIndows itself but not the MBR. A full
restore, which would restore it to factory condition, can't fix this
either, according to Samsung. The pisser is that it says it's loading
Windows when it starts up, but there's no way to get to a recovery
console. The only solution they could offer me is for me to send it off for
two weeks for service, which really sucks in three different ways.

I have virtually all of my data backed up, but I'm looking at many hours of
downloading, installing, and configuring all the programs I've installed,
not to mention configuring WIndows itself. I would wipe the drive right
now, though, if it would help, but since I'm told it won't, I'd rather not
lose everything for nothing.

So it appears that either I need a full installation disk to do a repair,
or I need to plug the hard drive into another computer (that can accept a
second notebook hard drive) as a secondary drive and fix it from a working
system. At least these options would preserve my programs and
configuration. If I send it back to Samsung, it will surely be wiped, for
which I would have paid and waited for, so I really hope someone can help
me out with this, because I've tried everything I can think of.

Thanks,
--Chrysanthemum

Nations are never conscious of all the riches they possess in the matter of
knaves.
--Victor Hugo, *Napoleon the Little*


On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 1:14 PM, maestro <maestro415 at gmail.com> wrote:

> # i have a 7ultimate repair disc i made in 7ultimate....
> # it is NOT the full OS but may do the trick....
> # i will be @ the space tues probably sometime before 3....
> # you may make a backup off my 7 partition if u like as well....
> # also there is info in the arctic wind(linux penguins) that veteran
> unix/linux users/developers have been able to use LinuxPuppy to even  fix
> partition shit in windows though I HAVE NOT done this....
> # you may be able to find this knowledge online or in linuxdev mags....
> # i have puppy disc with me but it runs in your ram so....
>
> end comments
>
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Chrysanthemum Hyphus <c at hyph.us> wrote:
>
>> Hello Noisebridge,
>>
>> I corrupted my master boot record on my Windows 7 laptop while trying to
>> uninstall Wubi before doing a proper install of Linux, so it will not boot
>> at all. I would like to non-destructively repartition my hard drive to
>> create a new partition for Linux, which has not been done yet. I have
>> all of my data on a separate partition from Windows, but I'm hoping to keep
>> the programs and any configuration data on the Windows OS partition intact.
>>
>> Does anyone have a bootable flash drive or bootable DVD with a utility to
>> at least fix the MBR without disturbing any of the data that currently
>> exists on it? A program that will do a nondestructive partition would be
>> awesome. If so, let me know when I could meet you at Noisebridge, perhaps
>> this Thursday afternoon if not sooner.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> --Chrysanthemum
>>
>> Nations are never conscious of all the riches they possess in the matter
>> of knaves.
>> --Victor Hugo, *Napoleon the Little*
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
>> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
>> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/attachments/20120116/175f369e/attachment-0003.html>


More information about the Noisebridge-discuss mailing list