Trying to boot into windows "missing operating system"

just got a macbook air.... love it. i had a dual boot system running well with osx and windows7.

i was going to try to install linux on a third parition. here's where it had gone wrong. i made the 3rd parition through windows in the device manager under the storage option and created the 3rd parition. i rebooted and attempted to use the bootable usb key with ubuntu on it but it didnt work. i tried using the refit option during boot up to update the bootloader and it did just that. after that i wanted to install ubuntu while on windows7 but i couldnt get into windows because i got a blank screen with "missing operating system"

how can i fix my bootloader? and merge the blank volume parition back to the windows7 parition?

It appears you overwrote the Windows 7 boot sector with GRUB. What you can try is to do a repair using your Windows 7 DVD. Follow the instructions that are given here. And, if you haven't already done so, remove rEFIt.

Make a backup of your OS X partition before attempting the repair.

grub? i couldnt install linux

i made the third parition in W7 and rebooted. refit saw the change and changed the bootloader. now w7 isnt recognized

The instructions to fix it are still the same as noted above.

Like he said, make sure you have a backup before you do anything else.

HOTWAX said:

grub? i couldnt install linux

i made the third parition in W7 and rebooted. refit saw the change and changed the bootloader. now w7 isnt recognized

Click to expand...

Doesn't matter if the Linux install was successful or not. The first thing the Linux installer does is write a boot sector for itself (that's GRUB) and then proceeds with the install. If it fails, it will leave the boot sector that it wrote to as un bootable.

Anyway, try the Windows 7 repair and get back to us.