Can't boot Win7 after Mint Install

[tj223]

So I broke my cardinal rule... Don't screw with anything important without making sure your backup is secure.

My HDD started with 4 partitions:

sda1 - 100mb Win7 Boot
sda2 - 215gb Win7
sda3 - 215gb NTFS Storage
sda4 - 500gb NTFS Storage

I then installed took the 4th partition and broke it up with GParted for a Mint install, so currently it looks like this:

sda1 - 100mb Win7
sda2 - 215gb Win7
sda3 - 215gb NTFS Storage

sda4 - 500gb Ext (Broken into the following logical drives)
sda5 - 75gb ext4 mounted /
sda6 - 8gb swap
sda7 - 420gb est4 mounted /home

So after I installed, Mint works like a dream, but as soon as I select Win7 it flashes a black screen and sends me back to grub.

So now GParted shows sda1 and sda2 as filesystem "unknown" instead of NTFS...
I am worried I will not be able to recover my Win7 install.

I ran a few scripts to try to recover recover the MBR, which worked, but once it tried to boot it said no os found.

So I ran Boot-Repair to get grub back going.
(If you arent familiar with boot-repair, all it does is run bootinfoscript, fix grub to default settings and create a url with the results.)
Here are those results:
http://paste2.org/p/2598460


Mint works fine still. (Using it to make this post.) But boot-repair did not even recognize Win7, so it isnt in the grub list.


[cpp]=================== blkid:
/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/sr0: LABEL="Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon 64-bit" TYPE="iso9660"
/dev/sda3: UUID="2EC87599C8755FCF" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda5: UUID="fc5e665e-bce0-4112-8ada-1655abeba1a3" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda6: UUID="3a1ed50e-8cff-493c-90dc-bbce83541dbb" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sda7: UUID="fa6619db-7ea3-4d02-b7e7-db9f303a300b" TYPE="ext4"


1 disks with OS, 1 OS : 1 Linux, 0 MacOS, 0 Windows, 0 unknown type OS.[/cpp]


At this point I couldn't care less about the Mint Install, I barely got it going. I can reinstall it with no problem.
I just hope there is a way to recover my Win7 without too much trouble. I have many work files on there.

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[skittle]

you may need to use something like testdisk to recover the partition table

 

[tj223]

Update: I was able fix the sda2 (recover the table?) with ntfs-3g and ntfsprogs.

But the 100mb boot partition still said unknown.

So I then downloaded the win 7 recovery disc, ran fixmbr, fixboot, and rebuildbcd.
Then did the startup repair and it booted to Win7, now I am on my win7 as I type this...

The 100mb partition is gone from windows, but I assume it is in the same state it was, and that the startup repair moved all the boot info to the C drive (sda2).

Now my question is how do I get grub to dual boot win and mint.

I have set up multiple boots on many machines in the past and never had any issues... Did I screw it up this time? Just lucky the times before? or is this a sign that my drive is failing?

Again, I dont mind wiping mint and starting fresh, just afraid I will have the same problem...

 

[skittle]

boot into mint and run 'sudo update-grub'

should automagically find your windows 7 install and add it to grub boot menu

 

[tj223]

I guess I wasn't clear on the update. So I will try to clarify.

I boot my pc and it goes directly to windows. The Win 7 repair disc effectively killed grub,

So my question is can I boot a live cd and setup the grub to boot both? or will the same problem I originally had happen again?

 

[tj223]

Got it running!

No data lost, dual boot with grub is working!

I had to run grub install with these parameters:

[cpp]sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda[/cpp]

Got my info from here.

@skittle: Thanks for the quick responses.

 

[tj223]

Best answer selected by tj223.