I was trying to make a live USB of OpenSUSE on my new Thinkpad laptop, but none of the windows tools I was trying worked. I put in a Live CD of Ubuntu 12.04 and tried to used the "dd" command to write the image to the USB drive. Unfortunately, I mistyped the command, and overwrote the MBR and part of the C: partition of the hard drive. I realised this almost imediately after running the command and stopped it with Control+C.
I rebooted the computer and was greeted with this error:
ISOLINUX 4.04 0x513118db EHDD Copyright (C) 1994-2011 H. Peter Anviv et al
Unknown keyword in configuration file: )╪x£i
Unknown keyword in configuration file: ╓─
Unknown keyword in configuration file: %[_
Unknown keyword in configuration file: {
No DEFAULT or UI configuration directive found!
boot: _
It seems that the boot loader from the OpenSUSE image was copied before I stopped dd.
I went back onto the Ubuntu LiveCD and took a look at the partitions with GParted. There were three tiny partitions, and the rest of the 500GB hard drive was not partitioned. I decided that I needed to fix the MBR, and used TestDisk to do this. It seems to have done that job ok. This is what I now have on my hard drive:
- BOOT, a 4 megabyte fat16 partition
- 1.46 gigabytes of unallocated space
- Windows7_OS, a 450.62 gigabyte ntfs partition
- Lenovo_Recovery, a 13.67 gigabyte ntfs partition
- 1.02 megabytes of unallocated space.
It seems that the first 1.5 gigabytes of my C: drive has been erased, but that Lenovo's Recovery partition is still unharmed. At this point, I assume that recovering the Windows 7 system files from where they are is impossible, and I will have to copy them from somewhere else.
Before I did any of this, I created a Lenovo Rescue and Recovery disk for my laptop. This is supposed to allow me to restore my laptop to factory condition from the Lenovo_Recovery partition. I booted from the disk and this is what happened: https://i.stack.imgur.com/b0QNs.jpg
I looked at the contents of the Lenovo_Recovery partition with the Ubuntu Live CD. It contains two *.wim files: cdrivebackup.wim and sdrivebackup.wim. It seems that these are the restore files that I need to put into action, but I have no idea how to use them.
So, this is where I stand. How can I restore Windows 7 to my partially reformatted laptop? If you need more info, please ask!