I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 dual boot with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10.. I had just finished a session on Win7 which was extremely slow, and I decided to restart in safe mode to uninstall some unnecessary software.
I went past grub, and booted into windows and was tapping the F12 key furiously to get the Safe mode option. I mistakenly pressed F11 repeatedly, I saw something getting edited , like a boot line or something and I pressed Escape hoping it would cancel out whatever I typed. I booted into Windows itself (not safe mode) , did the uninstalling, and performed a restart.
EDIT : I pressed F11 repeatedly and got this. This is what is the edited version looks like (incl. approx screen layout)
EDIT BOOT OPTIONS
EDIT BOOT OPTIONS FOR : WINDOWS 7
PATH : \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\WINLOAD.EXE
PARTITION : 1
HARD DISK : 5b210d4e
[ /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN
]
The last line, that is OPTIN can only be edited . I'm sure I edited this. Any idea what the default is ?
Now my Windows doesn't boot. When I select Windows from the grub menu, a screen comes giving me two options - Launch system recovery and boot Windows Normally. I chose boot normally, but as soon as the animates Win7 logo appears, there is a flash of BSOD and it restarts. I tried the 'Launch System Recovery' option but it doesn't seem to find any Operating System to locate any System Recovery Points.
sudo update-grub
in a terminal, this will undo possible changes in Grub. If that doesn't help, I'd say you've installed something he's missing now.