Hello everyone,

I've just received my Dell Studio 17 laptop, which comes with Windows 7 x64 preinstalled. I'm having quite a hard time installing ubuntu on it.

First of all, here is how I partitioned the drive using GPartEd:

|==Dell utility partition==|==Dell Recovery partition==|==Windows 7==|[==Ubuntu==|==Data partition==]|

Where [] denotes an extended partition.

Here are the steps I completed:

• I used GParted to create this structure, keeping windows 7 installed
• I booted ubuntu LiveCD, and installed it on the right partition
• I let it install grub automatically
• I rebooted intu ubuntu
• I went back to windows 7, no problems
• I then rebooted. Grub was gone.
• I used Super Grub Disk to restore grub, it didn't work.
• I tried to boot into ubuntu from supergrubdisk, but grub couldn't fint the boot folder
• I then reinstalled ubuntu, went through the same steps, but there SGD did boot my ubuntu
• I reverted to the previous version of grub, and installed it on my hard drive
• It worked, but trying to boot win7 got me the "No MBR, press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot" error
• I used the windows 7 cd to restore the MBR (the auto wizard didn't work, had to rebuild the mbr from command line
• Now Ubuntu is gone. 7 works fine
• I read a lot about this, and realized that many people could simply not boot win7 again after encountering this problem.

Now I'd like to restore GRUB, but I really won't go through the hassle of doing a full new cycle of installing/reinstalling everything again. Is there a GRUB guru around, to provide me with a detailed guide to not screwing everything up once again?

Thanks a lot!