[buug] MBR Crash

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Thiago Souza Araujo (prof.araujo at unidavi.edu.br):

> Yesterday I saw a link "compiz for windows vista" and tried to install it on
> my winvista notebook. An openSuSE installation poped up with graphics
> elements only...

You might want to devote some hard thinking towards determining what
was happening, at this point.  I mean, why on earth would attempting to
follow a "Compiz for Windows Vista" hyperlink in an MS-Windows Web
browser cause any sort of installer for openSUSE to start?  And how?

One reason you should devote some time to pondering that question is
that, otherwise, you risk attempting to solve the wrong problem.  Hold
that thought for a minute:

> I clicked to proceed without think and... Nothing happenned.
> 
> At least till I re-started. Then Grub was there (it shouldnt be... I was
> using only winVista on that notebook), incapable to boot both windows or
> openSUSE.
> 
> I tried to recover using the recover dvd, and with command line with the
> command fix Mbr and chkdsk. Nothing. Dell support couldnt help me and the
> same with microsoft. So, how it is not a matter of windows but a matter of
> MBR recover.

Getting back to the point, you've defined the problem as "something
overwrote the MBR" -- but (it sounds like) you're not sure what happened, 
exactly, so I'm not sure how you know that's what happened.  Further,
I'm not sure you know that's _only_ what happened, i.e., how you're sure
that the damage is confined to the MBR.

In any event, one possibly relevant tool is gpart, the "guess
partitions" utility, which examines a hard drive for filesystems
directly, and attempts to construct an appropriate MBR for them (which
includes the partition table).  Article:
http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/57748

However, beware of solving the wrong problem!  For example, have you
attempted booting a Linux live CD, and then seeing whether the partition
table is intact?  If not, then your problem might be limited to the
bootloader, which is a considerably easier problem to fix.