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#1
Lost boot loader / bcd entirely
Hi Guys,
I've routinely dual booted Linux and Windows over the years, but yesterday I hit a bit of a snag. I had Win7 and Vista both installed on a single hard disk. Since it had been awhile since I had booted Vista I decided to delete the partition and install Linux there. What I did not realize is that when I installed 7 it left the BCD on the Vista partition. So, when I installed Linux I effectively blew away my Windows boot loader.
I've tried a hundred things at this point without much luck, including the "nuclear holocaust" / manual rebuild of BCD from:
Recovering the Vista Bootloader from the DVD - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki
A few questions / thoughts from my google searches:
* Is there anything needed in /boot other than the BCD?
* I am wondering if the "active" / "boot" partition flag is causing me trouble. When I was trying to rebuild the BCD manually using bcdedit i was getting errors that the partition was not flagged active. I tried to use diskpart to flag it active but it said that the partition type was not valid for the active flag? I was able to set it active using the Linux gparted partition manager, but I can't understand why diskpart would not flag it.
* Is it possible to have your \boot on a different partition then \Windows? The recovery console is mapping C: to my "applications" drive and D: to my "system" drive which contains \Windows. I was wondering if I need to put \boot on C: instead of D:
Thanks for help / answers to any of these questions, i'm at wits end with this thing!