My laptop had Windows 10 installed from factory and has a 1 TB HDD. I recently downloaded Ubuntu 18.04 (LTS) from the net and installed it alongside Windows creating a partition as follows:
- disk 0 :700 GB NTFS
- disk 1 : 16 GB swap area
- disk 2 : 299 GB ext4
I installed Ubuntu onto disk 2 and successfully ran Ubuntu. However, when I restarted the computer the third time with my bootable USB stick inserted, it did not go to the purple OS selection page but went back to the Try Ubuntu without installing or Install Ubuntu page.
I decided to re-install Ubuntu so I opened Windows and formatted disk 1 and 2 and extended disk 0. I then restarted Windows while pressing down Shift which opened a blue screen where I opened command prompt and wrote the following:
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
The first command ran successfully but the second command said Access is Denied. I have no idea why I was doing this but I saw a tutorial saying I needed to do this.
I tried to fix it and so I did a diskpart(?) and assigned a name to the EFI directory and changed the file system to FAT32, but it was still not fixed. I realised, however, that I could install Ubuntu again without doing this.
So I installed Ubuntu successfully (this time with 800 GB in disk 0, 16 GB in disk 1 and 199 GB in disk 2) and can run Ubuntu but I don't have the option to boot onto Windows. BIOS shows I have only one OS - Ubuntu. I can access the files in the disk 0 partition from Ubuntu so I still have my files intact.
Is there a way to install Windows to disk 0 again without formatting the disk?
