I am a fan of dual boot computers that can load two different operating systems. I always keep Ubuntu Linux installed along with Windows on my computers. But in such a dual boot configuration, once you reinstall Windows for one or the other reason, then Ubuntu fails to load as the files necessary for Linux boot are overwritten by Windows re-install. Even though boot files are gone for Ubuntu, it still has everything intact and with just the boot repair you can start using your PC once again in the dual boot mode. While there are many ways of fixing this problem, the easiest one is provided by the Boot Repair disk.
The Boot Repair disk is a Linux bootable disk that loads the Boot Repair utility which can fix almost all the known problems related to Linux boot. Here is how you can use the Boot Repair disk to fix the dual boot configuration of Linux and Windows:
- Download the Boot Repair ISO image corresponding to your version of Linux. If you have 32-bit Linux, then download 32-bit version of Boot Repair ISO. Similarly, download the 64-bit version of the ISO image for 64-bit version of Linux.
- Burn the downloaded ISO image to a blank CD. You do not really need any third party tool for this as Windows 7 and Windows 8 have native support for burning the ISO images to blank CD/DVD media. Alternatively, you can use a third party tool like Rufus to make a bootable USB disk from the downloaded ISO image.
- Insert the bootable disk into your PC and turn it on. Either change the boot order in the PC BIOS, or press the boot menu key (usually F12) to select the bootable disk to boot from.
- It is going to take a few minutes before you will see the Boot Repair program launched on your computer screen. Just click on the Recommended Repair button to proceed with the fixing of the boot problem.
- Reboot your PC when asked and you would see the usual Grub menu with options to boot either into Windows or Ubuntu.
Conclusion: The Boot Repair bootable disk makes the task of restoring the Linux back if it fails to boot due to any problems. The most common problem of reinstalling Windows on a Ubuntu + Windows dual boot system which results in Ubuntu failing to boot, can also be fixed with this useful disk.
You can download the Boot Repair disk from http://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/files/.