Over the last year, I’ve had one laptop running UbuntuLinux and Windows in dual boot mode. Then, I wiped the hard drive and loaded only UbuntuLinux on it. For fun, I then decided to reimage the machine with Windows (I’d created a backup of a Windows only image before using PartImage, not dissimilar to this process here)–no GNU/Linux–and see what happened.

UPDATE 11/16/2009: You may want to read this summary article on a variety of backup/restore and reimaging options available for different operating systems. 

That’s where I ran into this problem when restarting the computer. Even though I knew that the computer had been reimaged and had the Windows operating system on it, it wouldn’t boot, just showed this error:

Grub Loading Error 22

The problem, apparently, was with something known as the Master Boot Record (MBR). My experimentation with UbuntuLinux and Windows had left the Grub menu system on my computer’s MBR. This prevented Windows, even though it was on my hard drive, from starting up.

To fix the problem, I googled the error above and found several sites. The most useful solution, however, was as follows:

1. Download the SuperGrubDisk, which comes in CD ISO and USB versions. It’s only a 4 meg file and since I had a blank CD to “throw away” I burned the file to CD.
2. I booted off the SuperGrubDisk (SGD) and chose the Win solution, which looks like this “WIN => MBR & !WIN! :(((((((((((((((((“
3. Then, my computer restarted and everything worked fine.

Another interesting link to explore is Bootdisk.com.

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