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I have a PC which I cannot boot into anymore. I really really don't want to reinstall the OS on it. (I don't want to lose the data and, besides, it's Christmas week.)

The PC has an SSD which had Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit installed. After a while I also installed Ubuntu, which automatically added GRUB to make dual booting easy.

Everything was good, until I decided I want to get rid of Ubuntu, so:

  • I used the Windows Disk Management tool to delete the Ubuntu partition and extend the Windows one to occupy all the free space which remained. It worked perfectly.
  • Now after restarting I get the error GRUB error: no such partition or something similar. I expected this, since the Ubuntu partition doesn't exist anymore.
  • Like so many articles and pages I found online said: I went ahead and booted from the Windows 7 DVD (it was the exact same DVD I used when I installed the OS). When I booted, I saw I had 2 choices for my DVD drive: one with UEFI, the other with AHCI.
  • I tried UEFI first. When going to "Repair my computer" I got some error message that said I should "use a DVD that is suited for my installed OS" or something along those lines.
  • Restarted and booted again, but this time using the AHCI option.
  • This time I got to the "Repair my computer" window and went directly to the Command Prompt.
  • It took me a while to find that bootrec.exe was in /Windows/System32. I executed bootrec.exe /fixmbr. The message was "Operation completed succcessfully"
  • Restarted.
  • Still the exact same error from GRUB (which is weird because shouldn't the bootrec command get rid of it?)

I saw something weird, which I think is extremely relevant. From what I saw on some pages/tutorials, when you click on "Repair my computer" the tool should scan for Windows installations and show them in a list, like this:

IMG:

However, in my case, the list was completely empty, which is probably why bootrec didn't work. My best guess is that it's because my Windows is on an SSD, and it needs some sort of drivers to properly load/see it. I'm not 100% sure of this though.

I don't want to try 100 random things and completely break it, so what should I do? Has anyone been in this situation before and found a solution that really works?

If I'm right about needing drivers because of the SSD, where do I get them from and how do I load them?

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Boot using a Windows 7 installation disk, after the first screen where you select your keyboard layout, press SHIFT-F10.

It should open a command prompt with basic funcionality and some system recover utilities.

Type the commands:

bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /fixmbr

This should be enough to get your system booting again. Do a normal reboot and see how it goes.

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