Deleted Grub loader and partition - HELP

[misstah]

I let a 'friend' use my laptop over the weekend. Now when I turn it on, it loads the BIOS details, then says no active partition, then no OS cannot be found.

It looks like they have deleted the partition with SuSE with the Grub Loader.

I cannot load up SuSE or Windows 7!

Any ideas on how to recover the boot to load Windows 7?

I have tried using the Windows 7 install disc to repair - but it does not recognise that Windows is installed and wants to do a clean install only.

Is it worth trying to reinstall SuSE and hope it detects Windows on the other partition? (I assume it is still there!)

I cannot get to a command prompt.

Any ideas gratefully appreciated!

[yancek]

Are you able to contact your 'friend' to see what s/he might have 'accidentally' done to your laptop. If not, use your Suse install CD? Boot from the CD and when you get to the Desktop, open a terminal/konsole and log in as root to get partition information. Run the command: fdisk -l (lower case Letter L in the command) and post that output here. This will tell you what partitions and their type are seen by the OS. You did not indicate which Suse you are using (SLED, OpenSuse, newest??)

When you get the output from fdisk above, it will tell whether there are still partitions. If there are, then you can mount them and view them. It may be something as simple as updating or re-installing Grub. Without this information as a starting point, it would be a lot of guessing because there are numerous things which could cause this.

I don't know your level of knowledge, if you don't know how to mount and/or view files from the Live/Install CD, post back and someone will explain.

I have tried using the Windows 7
install disc to repair - but it does not recognise that Windows is installed and wants to do a clean install only.

I've seen posts with this problem on various versions of windows but I think usually with a Recovery disk. Seems bizarre to me that this would happen with an installation CD. Don't use windows so I'm sorry I can't help with that. Do you have a repair option on the CD and that fails?

[misstah]

I put the HD into a caddy to see what was on there. The partition for SuSE is missing. The partition for Windows is still the same except that it is not active. The other partition for D: is the same as before.

I am going to try SuperGrub2 to try and load up Windows hopefully correct the inactive partition and a new MBR, then I will have to download SuSE again to put onto discs to try and reinstall it.

Thanks for your ideas

[yancek]

SuperGrub should work.

Here's the microsoft site for repairing windows 7 bootloader. Maybe you tried all this already?

How to use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows

[linuxforever]

Boot with the PartedMagic boot-cd.
Here you can see all partitions, and edit them.
Probably the suse partitions are still there.

[gogalthorp]

Windows will only show Windows partitions....surprise