[TriLUG] trying to repair a MBR

[Christopher Merrill via TriLUG]

One of our laptops at home suddenly will not boot into the OS. It is a Win7
system. I tried repairing with a Windows repair disk and that failed
completely so I've moved on to trying Linux tools to fix it. After backing
it up with my trusty pendrivelinux boot stick, of course :)

I am becoming painfully aware that I used to be much better at this stuff
than I am now :(

I've tried the boot-repair disk (
http://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/) and it says if fixed
it...but with no discernable change.

Looking at the info that it produced
  http://paste.ubuntu.com/14900332/

I'm assuming this line is the one of critical importance:
  => No boot loader is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda.

This part has me a bit confused:
> Partition  Boot  Start Sector    End Sector  # of Sectors  Id System
>
> /dev/sda1                   1 4,294,967,295 4,294,967,295  ee GPT
>
> /dev/sda1 ends after the last sector of /dev/sda
>
> GUID Partition Table detected.
>
> Partition    Start Sector    End Sector  # of Sectors System
> /dev/sda1           2,048       206,847       204,800 EFI System partition
> /dev/sda2         206,848       468,991       262,144 Microsoft Reserved
Partition (Windows)
> /dev/sda3         468,992   312,580,095   312,111,104 Data partition
(Windows/Linux)

The first part "/dev/sda1 ends after the last sector of /dev/sda" would
seem to be a critical problem, but the partition table identifies the
partition start/end locations just fine.

I'm not really sure what I should do next. I'm working under the assumption
I need to fix
"=> No boot loader is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda"

But am not sure the best way to go about it. I've come across several
solutions that work with "legacy BIOS" (not UEFI), but I'm assuming this
newish laptop is not considered legacy, since it is newer than those
articles.


Any advice?

TIA!
Chris


BTW, this is a Dell Latitude e6510 that was restored to the factory Win7
setup (by re-installing the OEM hard drive, which was not previously used)
and then fully updated last summer. It has only been used a few times for
Minecraft since then. I can mount the HD and browse files fine with various
linux USB boot tools, so the HD appears to be fully functional. While old,
is has almost never been used.



-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ -
Chris Merrill                           |  Web Performance, Inc.
chris at webperformance.com                |  http://webperformance.com
919-845-7601 x701                       |  919-845-7601

Web Performance: Website Load Testing Software & Services
------------------------------------------------------------------------ -