having messed up my grub by going to windows recovery and exiting without completing it, ihave followed all the instructions i have received to try and fix it. the sudo fdisk -l command gives me the following
sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xf89f2357

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13055 104857600 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 13055 15013 15728640 1b Hidden W95 FAT32
/dev/sda3 15013 30400 123592705 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda4 30400 30402 16384 ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32)
/dev/sda5 15013 18549 28399320+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 18549 21765 25832448 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 21765 22025 2086912 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 22025 23427 11264000 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda9 23427 30400 56006656 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 987 MB, 987758592 bytes
31 heads, 30 sectors/track, 2074 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 930 * 512 = 476160 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 2075 964540+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

how do i proceed? i want to restore my system to the dual boot that used to work so well before.....
i would really appreciate it if anyone could give me the step by step commands i need to follow until the grub and my system ( the one operating on windows 7 starter and linux mint11 ) to its original state

The very first thing is to save all the files you want from the hd before going any further.


The next thing I would do is restore windows (if it does not work) which if a restore cd is used may rewrite the entire hd.


The second thing I would do is try and restore the grub and the mbr.
Here is a great tutorial that explains how to with the steps to take.
Read Section 12

grub2

which device should i mount/ i tried to follow the instructions to reinstall grub but now it says cannot find file i tried to mountsda6' 7 and 2 on separate occasions

The only Linux partition you have is sda6. sda2 is a windows partition, boot maybe?? and sda7 is a swap partition. It would be helpful if you posted the actual commands you use and the output as otherwise we have absolutely no idea what you did and what did or didn't work. You would create the mount point, mount the partition and install grub:

Enter each line above separately and hit the Enter key after each.
This should work but not knowing what you did previously and the output you got, who knows?? You may have messed up your windows by mounting sda2 previously. What file does it say it cannot find. Posting actual error messages would be helpful.

You can download boot_info_script from http://bootinfoscript.sourceforge.net/ and run it as root. The output will be stored in RESULTS.txt in that folder which you can post here. It will clarify all the partitions as well as grub and booting info.