Cannot repair Windows 7 MBR after installing Fedora 15

[samwellsg]

After installing Fedora 15 on its own partition on the same hard drive as my previous Windows 7 installation, whenever I tried to boot into Windows 7 through GRUB it would tell me "BOOTMGR is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." So I looked up how to repair the mbr (booted up from usb drive that I burned the Windows 7 image to) and tried many things but nothing has worked. All I have managed to do is format the Fedora partition, delete it, then extend it back to the Windows 7 partition, which did not help. The GRUB bootloader is gone, but after attempting to repair the mbr, all I managed to do is delete GRUB but it still gives me the error "BOOTMGR is missing" when I try to boot.

System Recovery Options does say there is "Windows 7 Ultimate (recovered) on drive C:, which is where Windows 7 was installed but bootrec /ScanOs says there are no Windows installations.

I did everything in this tutorial ( http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/20864-mbr-restore-windows-7-master-boot-record.html ) and it seemed like it worked, but after booting it up it still said BOOTMGR is missing.
I also tried using the Bootrec.exe tool, doing the commands bootrec /FixMbr and bootrec /FixBoot, all of which did not fix my problem.

Ideally, I would not have to do a fresh installation. Any advice on fixing my Windows 7 MBR would be great.

 

[theog]

May be best to clean install.
If you have a External HD, you could copy & paste your data.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/93347-copy-paste-windows-recovery-console.html
than copy & paste your data to new HD.


All Linux code must be deleted using the CLEAN ALL command.As you have had linux on the HD you need do a Clean all & full format.

Try a full clean & full format in command prompt.


Type in command line
DISKPART
LIST DISK
SELECT DISK # (win HD)
CLEAN ALL
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
SELECT PARTITION 1
ACTIVE
FORMAT fs=NTFS
ASSIGN
EXIT
EXIT

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/91339-ssd-hdd-optimize-windows-reinstallation.html

 

[samwellsg]

Would there be any way to export my registry settings into a .reg file when the hard drive is connected to a different computer?

 

[oKdo]

Grub might be the cause

Hi,
I had a similar problem.
I had a bual-boot with Windows7 and Ubuntu installed on my computer, and wanted to replace ubuntu by Fedora15.
Fedora have an installation option that permit to replace all Linux installation on the computer, so I tried it.
Fedora has been well installed, but that's when I wanted to start with Windows that the problem appeared. When I selected 'Other' in the Grub menu, I got :
"MBR is missing, press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"
In fact, the problem came from the Grub configuration.
In /boot/grub/grub.conf, the 'other' configuration was :

title 'Other'
rootnoverify(hd0, 1)
chainloader +1

that I changed by :

title 'Other'
rootnoverify(hd0, 0) #you must change the partition number
makeactive
chainloader +1

And then Grub was able to launch the boot on the right partition.
Hope that it will help you...

PS: sorry, I'm french, and so my english may not be good. Take a look on this link about Grub, it's quite interesting (but in french):
Grub - Lea Linux