How can I recover my accidentally-deleted Windows 7 boot partition?

Question

I had Ubuntu and Windows 7 installed, but since I never used Ubuntu and it used 130GB of space I decided to delete it. I deleted two partitions and completely wiped the one with the data. The other one - which I believe had the startup - wasn't wiped. By the way, my CD drive doesn't work.

At first I got "error: no such partition" in GRUB. Eventually I managed to put the Windows Recovery Disk on a USB stick and made it bootable using PowerISO. Windows Repair couldn't fix the problem automatically.

I then read some forums and asked somewhere else and they said to download GParted and put that on a USB stick, boot from it, and edit my partitions there. I downloaded GParted and tried to set it up the same exact way I got Windows Repair to work (with PowerISO), but it didn't work.

I formatted it as FAT, FAT32 and NTFS (but exFAT didn't work, that's the only one I haven't tried). I tried a program they recommended called Tuxboot, too, but that didn't work. I always got "error: no such partition". I've tried all the USB slots.

How can I recover the Windows 7 boot partition?

Solution

I managed to fix it by following the instructions at SevenForums.

So basically, if you have this problem, download PowerISO, format a USB drive, click Create Bootable USB drive, select the Windows Recovery Disc (you can download it online), boot from USB, click command prompt, and do what it says there.

For me, bootsect wasn't there, so I typed in Bootrec.exe /FixBoot and then Bootrec.exe /FixMbr like a link in that link says. Then I restarted my computer and it worked.

Comments

[Simon Sheehan]

What you need to do is restore the MBR.

[Jamie]

Thank you sweet prince IT WORKED JESUS ALMIGHTY after eight hours. I googled that and followed these instructions: sevenforums.com/tutorials/… and they worked. Apparently I visited that link 5 hours ago too but closed it lol. Thank you!

[Wesley]

If no one puts the above comments in Answer form below I'm totally stealing it as per: meta.serverfault.com/a/1931/9770 =)

[iglvzx]

@Jamie, post the solution as an answer to this question! :)

[bwDraco]

@Jamie, you can post your solution as an answer. By doing so, we can upvote it and you can accept it (after two days) so that it no longer appears to be an unanswered question.

[Rob]

I had to do the same thing a little while back. It's a bit harder with XP, as that tends to not like being on a USB stick.