Cannot boot into 7, please help

Hello. I wasn't sure exactly where to post this so I'm going going with general discussion. I could really use somebody's help. Here's the thing:

I had a dual boot with Windows 7 and Ubuntu. Well, yesterday I decided to get rid of Ubuntu, so I went into disk management and deleted its partition. I shut down my computer and this morning when I turned it on I got the message "error: unknown file system grub rescue>". Turns out it's still trying to boot into Ubuntu and the master boot record is all messed up or something. In any case, I can't boot into Windows. My laptop (an Asus ul30a) came with a Windows recovery dvd, but it is useless since the ul30a has no optical drive. I thought I'd get on my grandma's Vista computer and make a bootable usb drive out of it, and looked up several methods on how to do this, including this one: System Repair Disc - CreateSo I run diskpart, select my usb drive, but when I try to select a partition, it doesn't work. It keeps telling me there's no partition selected. I can't finish the instructions for creating the bootable usb. So could someone please either telling what I'm doing wrong and how to create the recovery usb drive, or some other method of getting my computer to boot into Windows again. Thank you.

I'm following the steps, but every time I try to do something related to partitions it doesn't work. After the "clean" command, if I type "create partition primary" I just get a message telling me "there is insufficient free space to create a partition at the specified size and offset. Specify different size and offset values or don't specify either to create the maximum sized partition." My usb drive is completely empty so I don't know why it says that. If I type "list partition" it comes up with a list that has partition 1 on it. But then if I type "select partition 1" it tells me "there is no partition selected". I am at a loss here.

hitchhiker said:

I'm following the steps, but every time I try to do something related to partitions it doesn't work. After the "clean" command, if I type "create partition primary" I just get a message telling me "there is insufficient free space to create a partition at the specified size and offset. Specify different size and offset values or don't specify either to create the maximum sized partition." My USB drive is completely empty so I don't know why it says that. If I type "list partition" it comes up with a list that has partition 1 on it. But then if I type "select partition 1" it tells me "there is no partition selected". I am at a loss here.

Try using the Windows 7 DVD download tool to create a bootable windows 7 install thumbdrive. Microsoft Store: Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool Help The only kink I find is having to point it to an ISO file. Other than that its an easy way to make a bootable windows 7 thumbdrive

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll try these things out.

I ended up just reinstalling Ubuntu, even though I didn't really want to, which allows me to boot into Windows again. I swear I'm cursed or something, because all the things I kept trying and which are supposed to work just didn't. Hours of trial and error and frustration aren't even worth that 20 gigs of hard drive space. Thanks a lot anyways!

Alright, you're not cursed.

What you did is delete Ubuntu partition, but GRUB(2) stayed in your system, which overwrote MBR. You need to restore MBR before you delete the Ubuntu partition.

I'm very sorry but I don't really know how to restore MBR, but you can Google it. I guarantee you will find what you're searching for.

Good luck

Skulblaka: Yes, that is exactly my problem. I did try googling it, and I've searched several linux forums as well, but basically all the solutions I found talked about using a Windows repair disc to get mbr back, which is the one thing that I find myself inexplicably unable to do.

All my stuff is backed up, so I even wanted to just do a clean install, but again I have no optical drive and for some reason every method I try for making a bootable usb fails. Thank you everyone for your help. I'll keep looking out for other solutions, but I suppose this will have to do for the time being.