Recovering GRUB after windows installation

I finally used my windows upgrade kit to upgrade my laptop from windows Vista to Windows 7. This has been too much delayed because I use ubuntu lucid mostly anyway :).

One of the side effects during the upgrade is to load the GRUB loader menu from which I select the OS to load. Windows overrides that upon installation so it is completely by passed.

Luckily, this is a well covered topic at ubuntu forums since it is a likely thing to occur

A nice guide on how to restore the grub menu can be found at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Reinstalling%20from%20LiveCD
This is useful if you are using GRUB2, ubuntu 9.10+

To summarize:
  • Use a live CD to boot ubuntu on you computer
  • mount the system partition (or the partition having the /boot directory) in the original installation of ubuntu that you have to a specific location (say /meda/ubuntu_sys)
  • use the grub-install command:
    sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/ubuntu_sys /dev/sda
Reboot your system and , voila, You ubuntu installation is reachable again.

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