Vista Mbr Messed Up


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running vista on primary disk. decided to install freespire. bad move. it messed up the vista boot. i currently have 3 disks installed.

1 - vista with bad boot sector

2 - fresh install of vista

3 - ubuntu

if i boot linux, i can see the other 2 disks and files. i have copied most of my files to other drives. if i try to boot off of disk 1 with the bad sector, it won't boot. i get a grub error.

if i boot the fresh vista load i can see the other disk, but when you view it with disk manager the bad drive has blank for the file system and volume label.

i have tried to use bootrec and fixmbr, but no luck yet.

i have some things left on the disk i need to get to before i wipe the drive. how can i get this disk to boot again????

i have tried the vista cd to boot with and open a command window. the problem is i can't see the drive letter that i want to repair. the "c" drive is pointed to the recovery sector.

Edited by swampy
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i am no longer getting the grub error. it was "error 22". now all i get is a black screen with a flashing cursor. when i check the partitions in the command window it shows the largest partition of ~297 MB as a linux file system. do you know how i can get it back to an ntfs?

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Do you have a live linux cd? If so, you can try to reinstall grub:

1. Pop in the Live CD, boot from it until you reach the desktop.

2. Open a terminal window or switch to a tty.

3. Type "grub"

4. Type "root (hd0,5)", or whatever your harddisk + boot partition numbers are (my /boot is at /dev/sda6, which translates to hd0,5 for grub).

5. Type "setup (hd0)", or whatever your harddisk number is.

6. Quit grub by typing "quit".

7. Reboot.

Also from the Live CD, run the command:

sudo fdisk -lu\

And post the output here. It may help in troubleshooting

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