EasyBCD can only fix the Windows boot table but not the Linux one?

Question

I delete a Linux partition and now my computer won't boot up to any OS...

With SuperGrubDisk, I can boot up to Vista again, and if I run EasyBCD, it only fixes the Windows boot menu, which is the Vista and Wubi...

So EasyBCD cannot fix the Linux GRUB portion? (there is still another Ubuntu partition on that drive)

Answer 1

By far the most likely problem is that when you installed Ubuntu, it overwrote the MBR of the hard disk.

To repair the MBR, use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment. Super Grub Disk may also be able to write generic MBR code, but I have never used it.

To explain more fully, when IBM designed the PC, they decided that the MBR, the first 512 bytes of the disk, should contain the code to do the next part of the boot process and the partition table.

The generic type of code in the MBR finds the partition that is marked active in the partition table and loads the first 512 bytes of that partition. This is written by the operating system and will generally allow you to select the operating system to boot and continue from there.

So BIOS code runs MBR code runs active partition code. The active partition code may be the Windows bootloader that EasyBCD edits, Grub (stage 1), Lilo, or anything else.

The problem comes because many Linux distributions take a shortcut in the boot process. Instead of loading Grub at the start of a partition, they load it into the MBR. As the Grub (stage 1) just looks for the rest of the Grub system, it is not able to boot Windows without having loading the rest of itself.