Boot up problems (solved)

[iamtheNiGHT]

Okay I've already had Ubuntu working as a dual boot alongside Windows Vista and Windows 7 before, but I un-installed it several times to re-arrange my partitions.
And then I tried installing Hackintosh as my only second OS which didn't fully work out so I scratched that, but when I did it messed up my computers boot sequence and there was no way for me to fix it other then to put in a second harddrive and install windows on that, and from there put back in my first drive as a slave and change the bios to read the slave drive as the new primary drive so I could get back into windows.
Now I still have Windows 7 installed on that second harddrive and Vista on my primary. But now whenever I try to install Ubuntu or Kubuntu, the installation from a mounted ISO works fine, but whenever I try to boot into it from start up, it just restarts my computer.
And when I try to boot into Ubuntu or Kubuntu from a Live CD that I burned, the CD is fine, but with Kubuntu, when I go to try without installing, it just goes to the Terminal in DOS and wont proceed past that.
I've reset my bios back to default settings and tried, I changed random settings to random possible things many times and nothing changes.

[JohanLingen]

Re: Boot up problems

I am not sure on this, so be careful and make a backup of important data or wait until someone else provides another hint.

I'd try to take your first drive (detach the second) and run fixmbr from a Recovery Console. Maybe your MBR is upset.

[iamtheNiGHT]

Re: Boot up problems

Ah, I thought about that. But fixmbr is a Windows XP thing, doesn't work with Vista.
I have a few things I'm going to try now, hopefully it can reset it all back to the way it was.
I was stupid and forgot to make a shadowcopy before experimenting, and the other day i erased all my restore points to clear up like 20GB of harddrive space even though i didn't need to, not realizing i could of restored back to before I messed with everything. Ooops. :P

[iamtheNiGHT]

Re: Boot up problems

Haha, my bad. I had a blonde moment.
The other plans I had was fixing the mbr. xD
Which I got from reading what you posted.
My brain is so off today.
Either way though it worked like a charm! Thank you very much. :]

[JohanLingen]

Re: Boot up problems (solved)

Glad it works.

I assume you then used

Bootrec.exe /fixmbr

Mind that Shadow Copies is not the same as a backup, it will only store additional versions of files, but you still need the original. You can therefore NOT use it as a backup method. (unless you didn't mean the Windows Shadow Copies terminology, but just a regular backup ).

Also, Restore points won't help you in MBR issues, only in registry/driver issues.