GRUb Restoration in Dual Boot Mode

[GinnyBhullar]

I am facing strange kind of situation. I had installed Ubuntu 9.04 along with Windows 7 on my compaq laptop. I tried to install Windows XP Service Pack 2(which includes sata hard disk drivers). But I hadn't installed the OS. But after this when I restarted the Laptop, The GRUB was gone. I was directly into the Windows 7 without seeing the GRUB Menu. I had lost one 50GB partition which was showing as Free Space in the Disk Management. I have lost lots of data.
Is there any way to resolve this problem like recover the GRUB and Partition with its data? Kindly suggest me something..

[yancek]

Not being a windows user, I don't really understand the installing "xp service pack 2" part. On your win 7 partition? It seems obvious that whatever you did caused windows to overwrite the master boot record which removed your Grub stage1 file. You simply need to use your Ubuntu CD to reinstall Grub to the mbr or create an entry in the windows bootloader to do the same. Using Grub would be considerably simpler.

Before you could get any specific advice, we would need your partition information obtained by running the command: sudo fdisk -l from a terminal and posting the output here. That's a lower case Letter L in the command.

I doubt you have lost any data, your windows systems simply does not recognize other filesystems and shows them as unused or unallocated space.

[oz]

I am facing strange kind of situation. I had installed Ubuntu 9.04 along with Windows 7 on my compaq laptop. I tried to install Windows XP Service Pack 2(which includes sata hard disk drivers). But I hadn't installed the OS.

I'm not totally certain, but I was thinking Windows 7 had SATA drivers built in already. Either way, you might be able to restore GRUB with the SuperGRUB liveCD, or by using the Ubuntu installation disk to restore it.

[GinnyBhullar]

Not being a windows user, I don't really understand the installing "xp service pack 2" part. On your win 7 partition? It seems obvious that whatever you did caused windows to overwrite the master boot record which removed your Grub stage1 file. You simply need to use your Ubuntu CD to reinstall Grub to the mbr or create an entry in the windows bootloader to do the same. Using Grub would be considerably simpler.

Before you could get any specific advice, we would need your partition information obtained by running the command: sudo fdisk -l from a terminal and posting the output here. That's a lower case Letter L in the command.

I doubt you have lost any data, your windows systems simply does not recognize other filesystems and shows them as unused or unallocated space.

Actually before this, Windows XP SP2 could not be installed on my laptop because it is not having the support for SATA Drivers. The CD, I got was including the SATA drivers. To just check whether it can detect my hard drive, I tried the installation of Windows XP. I allowed the process till it shows the hard drive information. After that screen I restarted my laptop.But after that restart I lost the GRUB and a 50 GB partition.

Here is the output of "fdisk -l"

omitting empty partition (5)

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x1060494b

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        6502    52224000    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2            6502       13029    52428800    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3           13030       13333     2441880   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4           13334       30401   137098710    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5           13334       19556    49986184+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6           26084       30401    34681856    7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x541925ca

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       19457   156288321    7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdc: 1973 MB, 1973420032 bytes
60 heads, 59 sectors/track, 1088 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 3540 * 512 = 1812480 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000b2003

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1               1        1089     1927100+   b  W95 FAT32

At this time, my laptop was having 250 GB hard drive. 160 GB external hard drive(only one parttion), One 2GB Memory Card is attached to laptop.

[yancek]

Use your Ubuntu CD, load it and open a terminal and type the following:

sudo grub (asked for password, hit enter, get grub prompt: grub>)
from the grub prompt type:

root (hd0,4)
setup (hd0)
quit

this will install grub stage1 to the master boot record pointing to the remaining grub bootloader files on (hd0,4).