I'm on edge of tears. I have a dual boot machine for Ubuntu and Windows 7. After POSTing, I get sent into the GNU Grub menu. And recently, my Windows boot broke, and I can not boot into it. However, despite changing the settings in the BIOS and even entering Windows' boot menu, I can not boot neither my recovery dvd's (I made 4 copies just in case) to fix my Windows installation, neither an utility usb (hiren bootcd 10.5). I can boot into Ubuntu on usb and into a Win10 recovery usb, but those are kinda useless. I checked on a seperate device that both of these options work. I found on forums a solution for making gnu grub boot into an usb by changing the root device, and this works on my other dual boot pc, but on this one it just hangs when I try to either list my drives and partitions or change the root blindly. I really need the Win7 on this pc to work since I have software tied to it. I'm okay with deleting both ubuntu and gnu grub from this device since I only ever really used it for internet banking. But all the tutorials I find online are about how to do it from windows. I'm not very tech savvy, I kinda know my way around python and c from school, but I'm really at a loss, no combination works. Please help.
1 Answers
I managed to resolve this myself by luck and trying out things. I'm writting out what I did so someone else might find it helpful. This is written under assumption that you don't care about Ubuntu working afterwards and just want it gone.
First I backed up my data through Ubuntu. Ubuntu should be able to see the windows partition unless you hibernated your session (then it locks the drive and you can't access it).
Now, you need to bypass gnu grub by getting into the post POST menu where you can manually chose boot device (this isn't BIOS, but you can enter BIOS from this menu, on my machine I get here by pressing Esc during the hp logo screen). Boot from flash drive.
Win10 recovery usb can also repair Win7, to a point. I entered the start up repair, and on the first try it failed, so try a couple times. Then your computer should attempt to boot into Win7. It might fail, get a blue screen, restart, get you back into grub and possibly into Ubuntu. Just shut down and try to restart. Now Ubuntu will see that something is wrong and have I/O issues, but try to force shut down to stop it from attempting repair. Probably because I used Win10 to fix Win7.
Now you should attempt to boot into Win7, it might work, if not, run start up repair from the Win10 usb again.
Once you successfully booted into Win7, delete the partitions containing Ubuntu. There were two in my case. Don't touch System or C: though. Windows will complain that it didn't create them and that another OS might need them, so you will know you're deleting the right ones.
Now we need to run bootsect. I'm not sure whether my Win7 installation was just so broken or if this is a command you can run from command prompt only on Win10, but this didn't wrok while I was in my Win7. However, the Win10 recovery usb comes packaged with it's own command prompt under advance options. So boot into the usb again with the method from before. If you fail, you'll end up in grub recovery, which is rather broken, at least was in my case, didn't recognise the boot command and such. Just restart and try again if you ended up there. Once in the command prompt, change directory so you're as far up as you can get by using the command "cd..". There, type in "bootsect /nt60 c: /mbr" . It might take a few tries. If that doesn't work, a kind redditor suggested using the bootrec command, but I'm not familiar and haven't tried it.
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