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#1
MBR not found when booting Windows 7 (Dual-boot with linux)
I have 3 hard drives on my tower: one 250 gb for data, one with 500 gb for Windows 7(64) and lastly I have one with 80 gb for Windows XP(32). I had installed XP before I installed 7. After installing 7, whenever I powered the machine, it would allow me to choose between "Windows 7" or "an older version of windows" (XP). Perhaps I was not careful nor did I do enough research when I installed 7, but I assumed the hdd with XP would keep its MBR with only one option and a new MBR would be installed on the 500gb hdd allowing me to choose between both.
Now taking this in consideration, and as I had stopped using XP completely, I thought it would be harmless to format the 80gb hdd. I wanted to install Linux. So I installed Ubuntu (10.04) 64bit on the 80gb, assuming that grub2 would be installed there with an entry for Windows 7 (the MBR installed on the 500gb hdd). Things did not go as I'd expect. Not only did grub2 not display any Windows 7 entry, whenever I set the 500gb as first boot hdd, I get an error saying no MBR was found.
Believing that for some reason the MBR in the 500 gb was damaged (or maybe it never existed, perhaps what really happened was that the 80gb XP MBR was edited during 7 install), I inserted the Windows 7 64 bit dvd, accessed repair, dos and ran repair commands I found on the web (not blindly of course). More specifically, "bootsect /nt60 D:" ( MBR - Restore Windows 7 Master Boot Record ), where D: was the label shown for the 500gb hdd when I ran "list volume" in diskpart.
Unfortunately, this did not help, as the same error is still being presented. The data is there though, and in Ubuntu I can access it and I can even detect the existence of Windows 7 install using a script in the terminal there. Appreciate any insight.