HP netbook: error no such partition found: GRUB rescue.

blackbyte03 · 11-05-2011, 08:39 AM

Recently I bounght a HP netbook which came with windows 7. I decided to install Ubuntu 11.10 side by side of windows. Everything was working fine until i decided to reinstall windows through the recovery manager. Recovery was complete and I was asked to restart the lappy. But when i restated the boot process stopped at"error no such partition found:Grub Rescue".
Can anyone please show me a way to delete the GRUB from MBR and install the windows bootloader?
Also i didn't created a recovery image of windows( does that mean i am screwed?). All i have is Usb stick with Ubuntu 11.10

Any sort of help would be appreciated.
Thanks.

yancek · 11-05-2011, 09:28 AM

Using the Recovery partition should put the computer back to factory state. Apparently it doesn't effect the master boot record?
So you still have the mbr part of Grub looking for the Ubuntu partition you have overwritten with your windows Recovery. You can overwrite Grub in the mbr from the Ubuntu USB by opening a terminal and typing the command below. This will delete Grub from the mbr but obviously won't put any windows code there. You will need a windows CD to do that. I don't think a Recovery CD will do and you will likely need the full installation CD/DVD. If you don't have the installation CD, you can purchase them for a minimal cost if you bought the laptop from a major wholesaler. You could also just reinstall Ubuntu on a small partition and just use its bootloader or you could install another smaller distribution of Linux to use its bootloader. NOTE: The code below will only work if you have only one hard drive. Do not have any other hard drives attached. If you are not sure run sudo fdisk -l(lower case Letter L in the command) first and you could post that here. And obviously, your computer will be unbootable after but it is now. You should of course, still be able to boot from the usb/flash if your computer has that capability.

Quote:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1

I would think you could borrow an installation CD for win 7 from someone and use it to restore the bootloader. Since this is basically a windows problem, you might try some windows forum also.

blackbyte03 · 11-05-2011, 11:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by yancek

Using the Recovery partition should put the computer back to factory state. Apparently it doesn't effect the master boot record?
So you still have the mbr part of Grub looking for the Ubuntu partition you have overwritten with your windows Recovery. You can overwrite Grub in the mbr from the Ubuntu USB by opening a terminal and typing the command below. This will delete Grub from the mbr but obviously won't put any windows code there. You will need a windows CD to do that. I don't think a Recovery CD will do and you will likely need the full installation CD/DVD. If you don't have the installation CD, you can purchase them for a minimal cost if you bought the laptop from a major wholesaler. You could also just reinstall Ubuntu on a small partition and just use its bootloader or you could install another smaller distribution of Linux to use its bootloader. NOTE: The code below will only work if you have only one hard drive. Do not have any other hard drives attached. If you are not sure run sudo fdisk -l(lower case Letter L in the command) first and you could post that here. And obviously, your computer will be unbootable after but it is now. You should of course, still be able to boot from the usb/flash if your computer has that capability.

I would think you could borrow an installation CD for win 7 from someone and use it to restore the bootloader. Since this is basically a windows problem, you might try some windows forum also.

Thanks a lot for the reply.
After running the code in the terminal i got the following

Code:

1+0 records in
1+0 records out
446 bytes (446 B) copied, 0.00342244 s, 130 kB/s

Does that mean the GRUB is deleted from the MBR and I can proceed with the windows part?

yancek · 11-06-2011, 07:30 PM

Quote:

Does that mean the GRUB is deleted from the MBR and I can proceed with the windows part?

That's what it's supposed to do, only one way to find out.