Something happen to a windows Master Boot Record (MBR) that you’re responsible for? Want a very quick, very easy way to restore it with nothing but your craft, native intelligence and a liveCD?
Be cautious here – you’re working with your disks in a very direct manner. If you don’t have everything backed up or are unsure of anything, you may want to wait until you have a standard Windows CD/DVD.
Boot into your Ubuntu LiveCD on the offending machine. Once Ubuntu starts up, go to System -> Administration -> Software Sources and enable (by checking it off) the Universal repository.
Now, open a terminal session (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and type the following:
sudo apt-get install ms-sys
ms-sys is a program used to write Microsoft compatible boot records.
Now you’ll need to figure out what partition is the one hosting your Windows operating system. Back in the command line, type:
sudo fdisk -l
That will list the available partitions. You’re looking for a partition that says something like
/dev/sda1 1 9327 74919096 83 NTFS
The two important bits are the ‘/dev/sda1‘ which is the partition itself and the ‘NTFS‘ which tells us it’s a Windows formatted partition. So your Windows partition exists on your drive sda and it’s partition 1. The MBR for drive sda (assuming you boot into windows using it’s native boot loader) is what you want to repair.
We want to fix the MBR on /dev/sda. To do so, type:
sudo ms-sys -m /dev/sda
You’ll want to change the ’sda’ bit if your results from ‘fdisk -l‘ are different. If for instance your windows install is on sdb or hda.
Once you do that, reboot the machine, removing the LiveCD from the drive and Windows should come back to you.
Sure, you could do this by inserting the correct Windows CD and booting into repair mode from it – but I find the Ubuntu way a bit faster and I’m more likely to have an Ubuntu LiveCD on me than a Windows CD.
Thanks for the info but it’s a bit more complicated than your instructions
due to licensing issues. The package has been removed from recent versions of Debian / Ubuntu so enabling the Universal repositories isn’t enough.
You can find the DEB package at http://packages.debian.org/etch/i386/ms-sys/download
Hi there Nick
Tank you for the response
What version did it stop working i get many response from people who thank me for information and that they where able to fix windows MBR i did use it a couple times myself and it worked.
Kindly Tonny
I’m not sure. I was using a Ubuntu 9.04 LiveCD that I got from a Linux Format issue
and was following your instructions when I couldn’t get the package installed with apt-get.
Some net research led me to the Debian download link above. According to the last comment http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=470678 , the package was removed in March 2008.
Depending on when Ubuntu syncs with Debian, it might still be available in Hardy but not Intrepid or later.
Nick