Can't boot in any OS

Dell E521 running dual boot Windows Vista/Ubuntu 10.x. My x-daughter in law was on the web when the browser locked up. She got into Task Mgr and randomly starting killing processes :mad When it rebooted it crashed and showed a black screen with some text off the top of the screen and a grub rescue prompt, apparently she lost Grub. Via Boot Menu (F12) on startup and selecting “Normal” immediately takes you to grub rescue prompt. Ls in grub rescue shows 4 drives/partitions (hd0), (hd0,msdos3), (hd0,msdos 2), (hd0,msdos1). “Set prefix =” and “set root =”, etc, commands in grub rescue to redirect grub result in “Invalid drive specification” errors. Selecting “Bootable Hard Drive” or “USB device” at startup executes config.sys and autoexec.bat (not to mention loading 1.44Mb Floppy drivers) and then gives a “Device MSCD001 driver not selected” or “Device not found” error and takes you to an A: prompt. DIR at this point shows only basic DOS commands. B: drive is also available showing same DOS commands. C: - Z: all yield Invalid Drive error. Dell 521 Diagnostics and Utilities CD will run when booted to CDROM drive and Diagnostics tests all yield “Pass” results as in everything is fine. Stepping through Autoexec.bat shows nothing abnormal until the following:

set cdrom= (nothing is specified)
shift
shift
A:\MSCDEX.EXE /D:mscd001 /L :

Apparently my MBR is missing or corrupted? I don’t have a Vista Recovery CD, only Diagnostics and Utilities can with the PC. Any hope to recover before I try a Win7 Upgrade and will even that work? Thanks for your consideration.

 

Re: Can't boot in any OS - fixed!

Got it fixed, sort of. Downloaded Super Grub Disk ISO from ubuntu website. Uninstalled Grub and will now boot into Windows. Blew off Ubuntu for now. Thanks.

 

If/When you decide on giving dual boot a shot again, keep in mind the number of partitions you can have. I've done it and made the 4 needed linux partitions logical partitions. Read these two, they work and have an active writer who helps with questions:

http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2011/09/18/guide-to-disks-and-disk-partitions-in-linux/

http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/06/06/how-to-dual-boot-linux-mint-13-cinnamonmate-and-windows-7/

 

Thanks for the tip!