How to fix the boot sequence and/or restore a deleted partiotion

Question

I have a computer with a 250GB HD on which there were installed a few operating systems. When the computer boots, I got the GRUB menu with all these Ubuntu installations (about 10 versions - I don't know exactly why) and one Windows Vista, which was installed on a 20GB partition.

This Vista partition got almost full, and since the current user does not need all the Linux installations, I thought I can delete the other partitions and increase the Vista one.

So, I went to Vista's Disk Management utility and saw 4 or 5 partitions, of which one was C: and was ~20GB in size. One of the other partitions was about 170GB so I removed it to free the space. It did not allow me to increase the Vista partition size, though.

However, once the computer was restarted, I no longer get the GRUB menu. Instead, I see a GRUB Error 22 and the boot process gets stuck.

1. Can I make the computer boot from the Vista partition automatically? How?

2. If not, can I restore the deleted partition and the GRUB functionality?

Answer 1

While waiting for the answers, I found this question and followed this answer to the Ubuntu Grub2 Reference page, and from there to the boot-repair utility page. While starting the computer from a Kubuntu LiveCD, this utility was able to fix the problematic startup sequence, and now the machine starts with Windows Vista directly.

Thanks for the other suggestions.

Answer 2

boot into a live cd or usb in linux, and use gparted or parted to restore the lost partition.

if not successful, try knoppix which has gpart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gpart that specializes in partition recovery

Answer 3

It sounds like you just want the Windows bootloader replaced

See Fixing windows MBR without Vista Recovery CD
and Fastest way to restore Windows 7's original MBR?