Solved Corrupt MBR Record Windows 7 Ultimate

[pnfreeman]

Hello,

Background:
Win 7 Ultimate 64bit
Intel on Intel. custom build, 2 WD, 1tx2, raid 0 array. 1 Seagate 160gb

My troubles are of my own making. I corrupted the MBR of the Windows system when I tried installing Linux Mint on the Seagate 160gb HDD.

I tried doing the installation of Linux so that I would have 2 completely separate OSes.The problem is that I forgot to change my BIOS before I proceeded with the Linux install. I did not want GRUB to be dual boot. I want to choose which system I use regardless of the state of the other system.

When I reformatted the SG HDD during the Linux install that caused the problem with the MBR record.

To make matters worse, I can no longer get into BIOS. Whatever happened during the next boot caused BIOS to think it's password protected and I never password protect BIOS.

I have Acronis and Norton Ghost backups but, they're not going to help me because I never backed up the SG disk.

I'm hoping someone would know of a way to fix the mbr, otherwise I'm going to have to re-install windows and start from scratch.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi and welcome to SevenForums,
The default install when installing Linux is along side of an existing os did you change that ?
And exactly which version of mint 17.1 ?

 

[pnfreeman]

Hello ThrashZone,

Thanks for the reply and sorry it took awhile to get back to you.

I resolved my problem with the boot loader and got Linux Mint, Rebecca 17.1 installed. I needed a Linux distro on my Win7 machine to SSH into my server from time to time. It got to be a pain switching machines all the time and running multiple machines makes my office too hot.

The fix turned out to be easy. I went ahead and installed linux because that was the easiest way to fix the MBR of Windows. Then, I
added a 4th drive (another 160g Seagate) and allocated that drive to Rebecca as well. Finally, I had to reset my bios to get rid of the password. Everything is working great, again.