GRUB booting with Ubuntu Studio and Win 7

Boot from the Windows 7 installation disc. You can choose to repair an installed system. After the repair process Windows 7's bootloader is the main boot loader and GRUB will have disappeared.

However, you can't boot Ubuntu anymore. Is this what you would like to do?

Win 7 has a fix section on booting from the disk but i already tried that,i should have learned Linux earlier in life instead of Windows.i did download a program called testdisk but have not let it redo the bootsector.i thought i would unplug the win 7 drive and reinstall ubuntu and then see if the win disk could fix it ,I had hoped that iI could get some help on this forum for some one to know how to undo grub,I thank you for the try anyway and i will keep having hope .I just started running Win7 and do not know all of its working like i know XP and Vista but Win7 is still vista but not vista it still sucks like vista though.

Yes, just reboot into Windows, get to a command-line and type in

fixmbr

that should then make the hard-drives MBR point to the Windows boot-loader on the right hard-drive rather than pointing to a boot-loader on the external drive.

When you boot up the machine control is passed from one system to another which is made very unclear to Windows users. First you get a splash-screen from the mbord and very basic hardware detection occurs. Then control is passed to the bios which looks up the boot-order that it has stored and the bios tries each item in the boot-order list in turn to see if it can find something bootable there. If it gets as far as looking at the hard-drives and finds something then it looks first at the MBR of the "1st" hard-drive to lookup where the boot-loader is. The boot-loader itself could be almost anywhere as long as the MBR can give good enough directions to it.

I hope this helps!
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

I had that situation back in the day (Mandrake), of the linux boot loader messing with my MBR making windows inaccessible. Recently I wanted to give Ubuntu a try and remembering lessons from the past, I bought a Vantec NextStar hard drive cradle and physically disconnected my Vista drive and installed Ubuntu on an external drive and then just swapped drives as my dual boot solution. Once after trying to boot Vista on a DVD it didn't recognize was the first time I found out that Vista had a built in boot loader. Not being much of a command line person I found a GUI for editing the Vista boot loader, EasyBCD http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1 Since each OS was installed without the other drive present there are no issues when booting each drive separately. However the Vista boot loader works well enough that I've installed both drives internally and even had some problems with each drive that were corrected and I have never had to go back and change anything to the boot loader.

Lol, John you have been lucky. The Windows boot-loaders tend to be very difficult to edit and also very vulnerable to falling over.

Usually it's just much easier to install one version of linux onto the same hard-drive as the Windows and then use the Grub (GRand Unified Boot-loader (or even the slightly older Lilo)) from that to give all the different OSs you might have on your system
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot
Then i would use any external drives purely for data.

There is, of course, the option which we are getting around to in this question. Setting the machine's bios's boot-order to look for Cd/dvd-drives first, then external/usb-drives and then finally hard-drives is an excellent way around the problems of having an OS on an external/usb-drive rather than on the internal drive along with Windows or whatever. I think sorting this question out just 1 step at a time makes it mush easier for ffly to understand. Also ffly hasn't yet asked us to solve that next part of the problem, which is much more easily solved in linux.

To be fair i haven't tried Win7 yet but i doubt their boot-loader is much more stable and reliable than previously. The Vista one was quite a lot better but even Lilo is so radically much better that i seriously doubt Win7 has any chance of catching up. Also i very much doubt that Microsquish would make it easy to add in rival OSs into their boot-loader - they are not exactly famous for co-operating with their competition.

Anyway, good luck and regards from
Tom :)