Thinkpads Forum

have situation where MBR of T43 was damaged ( by Ubuntu installation)
and now neither Windows nor service- recovery partition can start
I downloaded and used IBM,Lenovo repairmbr cd/option1-repair mbr;it said-"not a lenovo mbr "
(but it did write something because now Ubuntu cannot start either-I just get black screen with -'o.s. not found, error')
Then I wanted to try bmgr32.exe,but could not get it to run under boot win PE cd/dos-window(got -'could not open MBR for read/write')
Then back to repairmbr cd,now
option 2-replace mbr ,with selection 1(= RnR ,for newer pc ;that is not selection 2=Rapid restore PC)
It did some work and said in the end -'can't unhide partition 0 type 131'
(i guess ubuntu ext2 partition) and after that 'sucessfuly finished'!
However I still cannot get to boot windows or recovery partition
I guess I am left now with partition table that stayed the same( ext2 as partition 0 and windows and service partitions lost whereas they should be of type80 and type12-hidden,and with good f11 code inside the mbr?
Meaning the repair steps are as
1.repair partition table with found lost partitions(do I delete ext2 partition, mark the windows partition active and HIDE rescue/recovery partition ?),
2. do FIXMBR and then
3.bmgr32
(where should I run it from -laptop needs to boot into some 32 bit dos environment?or bmgr from mentioned cd will do)
or perhaps something that would allow for keeping Ubuntu as well
if repair not possible is it sensible
to insert a mbr taken from another thinkpad laptop that has same os, hard disk size and service partition(same BPB data I guess)
or is there a way to image the recovery partition to cd/dvd ?(to then reinstall windows from it)
Thanks in advance

I have successfully rewritten MBR's with a puppy linux live cd.

Boot the cd, open a terminal, and enter an ms-sys command.

Here are the options. Note that the device name is probably /dev/hda but you can check it by typing fdisk -l

Read up on the fdisk and ms-sys commands before you use them. You can screw things up completely (although probably not more than they're already screwed up!) by misusing these commands.

Usage:
ms-sys [options] [device]
Options:
-1, --fat12 Write a FAT12 floppy boot record to device
-2, --fat32nt Write a FAT32 partition NT boot record to device
-3, --fat32 Write a FAT32 partition DOS boot record to device
-4, --fat32free Write a FAT32 partition FreeDOS boot record to device
-5, --fat16free Write a FAT16 partition FreeDOS boot record to device
-6, --fat16 Write a FAT16 partition DOS boot record to device
-n, --ntfs Write a NTFS partition Windows 7 boot record to device
-l, --wipelabel Reset partition disk label in boot record
-p, --partition Write partition info (hidden sectors, heads and drive id)
to boot record
-H, --heads Manually set number of heads if partition info is written
-7, --mbr7 Write a Windows 7 MBR to device
-i, --mbrvista Write a Windows Vista MBR to device
-m, --mbr Write a Windows 2000/XP/2003 MBR to device
-9, --mbr95b Write a Windows 95B/98/98SE/ME MBR to device
-d, --mbrdos Write a DOS/Windows NT MBR to device
-s, --mbrsyslinux Write a public domain syslinux MBR to device
-z, --mbrzero Write an empty (zeroed) MBR to device
-f, --force Force writing of boot record
-h, --help Display this help and exit
-v, --version Show program version
-w, --write Write automatically selected boot record to device