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So 3 months ago I built a PC, but had the opportunity to borrow an SSD from my place of employment. I originally installed windows 7 trial mode on that SSD, and then after a few weeks upgraded to windows 8, but installed it on a second hard drive. I then wiped the SSD (at least I thought i did the whole drive), and used it as a data drive in windows 8.
Today I took the SSD out of my system to take back to work, and immediately formatted the whole thing to put ubuntu server on it for work. Now I'm back home and the windows 8 drive can't boot anymore. Apparently when windows 8 was installed, it just replaced windows 7's boot loader with its own, but on the ssd.
So For the past 2.5 months I've been booting to the ssd, which has then been forwarding to the hard drive's OS sector. Now that the SSD is gone (and completely wiped), the chain is broken and I don't have a boot sector. How do I create one without re-installing windows entirely?
I have a windows 8 installation USB key that I can get into recovery mode with. Here's some stuff from diskpart that i've transposed from photos:
DISKPART> LIST VOL
Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 NTFS Partition 465 GB Healthy
Volume 1 C ESD-USB FAT32 Removable 14 GB Healthy
DISKPART> LIST DISK
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
* Disk 0 Online 465 GB 0 B *
Disk 1 Online 14 GB 0 B
DISKPART> LIST PARTITION
Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
* Partition 1 Reserved 128 MB 1024 KB
Partition 2 Primary 465 GB 128 MB
DISKPART> ACTIVE
The selected disk is not a fixed MBR disk.
The ACTIVE command can only be used on fixed MBR disks.
It looks like there's space for a boot sector there, but I can't assign that reserved partition a drive letter, which is as far as I could get with https://superuser.com/a/504360
I can't set that partition as active either, cus the drive table isn't mbt.
Thanks.
"I can't set that partition as active either, cus the drive table isn't mbt." - For UEFI maintenance, you should look at The rEFInd Boot Manager and The rEFIt Project. Rod Smith does a lot with the UEFI gear, is the author of rEFIind, and he hang's out on Super User on occasion. – jww – 2015-04-22T20:26:20.253
@jww, You mean http://superuser.com/users/171594/rod-smith ?
– Pacerier – 2015-05-01T14:34:41.127