Startup Repair Infinite Loop

S

solehide

New Member
My mom have an acer aspire one series notebook.
I have dual booted it with windows 7 home (came pre-installed, I think. It's given by her employer) and ubuntu. Every time I start windows, the automatic startup Repair wizard appears and the problem is very similar to this.

Now I tired copying the files from RegBack to C:/windows/system32/config directory as instructed and now starting windows leads me to black screen.

I can browse all the files in the windows partition from ubuntu and my inexperienced I see everything I am supposed to see. Using command line, I figured out windows is in e dirive (it was c when windows was working).
How can I make everything back to normal. As you can expect, no backups :( :(

UPDATE: Reinstalled Windows and it failed again!!! What's this? Failing Hard drive? I have a liveCD (or LiveUSB) now.
 
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Does she get infected a lot? I see a lot of times this is caused by malware or a bad windows update. Access the system recovery menu and do a system restore back to when it was working fine.
 
Since you have a Ubuntu partition I'd also FSCK the Windows partition from within Linux.
 
(Sorry for the very late reply, we had a family tour and came back yesterday). I did a bootrec /fixboot and now no ubuntu :(
Can't experiment today, will come back tomorrow...
 
Hello

solehide said:
I did a bootrec /fixboot and now no ubuntu
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Indeed, that tells Windows to overwrite the MBR, or GRUB in this case. Windows doesn't give two craps about dual booting to Linux so you'll have to reinstall GRUB
 
meaning I will have to create a live CD? Welll, I guess, I will do a reinstall (of windows. and then try and get ubuntu back when I have a lot of free time). :) Thanks anyway :) :)

UPDATE: Windows failed again!!! What's this? Failing Hard drive? I have a liveCD (or LiveUSB) now.
 
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solehide said:
meaning I will have to create a live CD? Welll, I guess, I will do a reinstall (of windows. and then try and get ubuntu back when I have a lot of free time). :) Thanks anyway :) :)
Click to expand...

If you use an Ubuntu live CD, you *might* be able to chroot into the existing Ubuntu install. It will still be there, you have just told Windows to scribble lines all over the GRUB bootloader so it doesn't work/exist TL;DR insert the Ubuntu live disk, and press CTRL-ALT-F1. Use the command lsblk or
Code: 
find /dev/sd*
to see what partitions are available. Might be sda1, sda2, sda3, sda4, etc depending on what Windows partitions exist also. When you know the name, run
Code: 
sudo mount /dev/sd** /mnt
where sd** is the partition name for ubuntu (e.g sda4). Then run
Code: 
sudo chroot /mnt
and you will be in the Ubuntu installation. You can now run something along the lines of
Code: 
sudo update-grub
and that might hopefully reinstall grub for you. You might need to run grub-install or grub-mkconfig as well or instead. I have never had to do this :P

Otherwise, you can always try a different method, which might be simpler to achieve...

Use a piece of software called EasyBCD on Windows to do it, it has an option to generate a GRUB2 boot menu IIRC.

Otherwise, you can try Grub4Dos (https://gna.org/projects/grub4dos/) on Windows. Not sure how it is set up, but one of my laptops has a version built into the UFEI BIOS that I can access sometimes (bit weird, but hey).

Otherwise, just do a clean install of Windows, then Ubuntu. Shrink your Windows Partition in WINDOWS using either diskpart.exe or the graphical interface diskmgmt.msc. I have known Ubuntu to accidentally annihilate Windows before when shrinking partitions.
 
I know I am not supposed to say say sorry for the same reason twice, but, well, I couldn't help it; sorry for the late reply. Just now I was searching for this, had a howtogeek article opened, but I think it won't work in my case. Trying this first. :)

update1: No Luck :(
chroot: failed to run command '/bin/bash': Exec format error"
Click to expand...
 
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