Unknown filesystem on Lenovo B460e laptop

Question

I got a Lenovo B460e laptop yesterday (given by the Tamil Nadu Government). It has Windows 7 Pro on it.

I set it up the way I liked it. All software drivers and all. I wanted extra drives, so I entered the Windows diskadmin and changed my partition setup by splitting. I did the partition setup in the installing process, so I split my harddisk into 4 parts. So far so good.

When I rebooted, I entered GRUB Rescue Mode. In this mode I know the only command ls. Which returns something like:

(hd0) 
(hd0,msdos5) 
(hd0,msdos4)  
(hd0,msdos2) 
(hd0,msdos1)

This laptop does not have a CD drive, otherwise I could have formatted the OS and installed a new OS using Windows 7 CD. Now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.

Any idea on how to fix this?

Answer 1

If you have another computer, you can download the Windows ISO and boot an USB drive from it.

Now you can install Windows 7 onto it.

Answer 2

Grub usually indicates that a Linux installer has been run and the MBR corrupted which normally results in the at boot recovery option not working. Did you try to install Linux on the system?

I have read that removing the partitions you added might help but have not tried this personally.

Answer 3

If this computer was given you by the government, are you sure it's a good idea to uninstall the original software that came with it?

It seems like GRUB is trying to read the boot configuration that was in a partition you erased. Rewriting the MBR with a Windows installer will make Windows able to boot, but your Linux partition won't work anymore.

Answer 4

I have the same laptop and i removed the linux partition as it was having issues with super user. So the MBR got corrupted as the grub loader reads configuration from that linux partition that i erased.

To resolve this, get a windows7 iso, copy all the files inside it to a pendrive and make it bootable. You can use this link for more info: http://www.chillgeeks.com/2010/03/create-windows-7-bootable-usb.html

Now, while the computer boots, go into BIOS settings by pressing F12 and set USB drive as the first boot. You will now go into the installation of Windows 7. Give repair and select the windows 7 installed.

This will go to a command prompt. Just type the below two commands:

fixboot /r
fixmbr /r

Reboot the comp, remove the pendrive and voila! Since i had the bootable win7 pen drive, it took me just 10 min to recover the win7 on the laptop.