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So, I have this Asus Eee PC 1201HA, and I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS via Wubi, but when I tried to factory reset my computer, an error came up the BOOTMGR was missing, or something. In the end I just formatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows 7 starter, but now that I tried to install Ubuntu back via a bootable USB with Unetbootin, I would restart my computer and choose to boot from the USB, but I would get the BOOTMGR is missing message again.

I then tried to reinstall with wubi, but whenever I rebooted and chose Ubuntu to try to finish the install, it would take me to some magicbox or somethingbox commandline and say something along the lines of losetup: no loop found any suggestions?

Braiam
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user3203576
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  • Thank you all for your answers, but I researched the problem myself and it turns out that the usb wasn't formatted to fat32, but ntfs, and it wasn't marked as active, so I just fixed that, and the bootable usb worked fine. Also, to first answerer, have a small laptop that doesn't have a cd port, so I have to use unetbootin. Anyway, this time, I didn't use wubi, I installed it comepletely. – user3203576 May 27 '14 at 17:13

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Honestly, Wubi sucks in my opinion. I would just download the .iso of Ubuntu 12.04LTS, burn it to a disk, pop it in the disk tray, reboot your machine and install Ubuntu. It comes with a partition manager once installing so you can determine how much you want to allocate for Ubuntu vs. Windows. You won't have to worry about overwriting your disk UNLESS you choose "Erase Entire Disk." Wubi used to be good; however, I feel like there is a lack of communication between Ubuntu and the inventors of the side-by-side OS installer application. Hope this helps. In order to get rid of the GRUB/BOOTMGR issue, just uninstall Wubi and restart for confirmation.

user3669669
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  • If no disk drive, place the .iso in your flash drive. Also, make sure you set your BIOS to boot to your flash drive. If something goes wrong after the installation, there is always software such as "GParted" that you can use to delete the corrupt partition of Ubuntu and reformat the Windows partition. This is just "worst case scenario". And if you don't like Ubuntu's stability, try full blown Debian. – user3669669 May 23 '14 at 17:15
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My comment would be too long.

If BOOTMGR was missing, that means that you probably installed/partitioned on top of where your boot records reside (usually on primary partition for Windows). You can do Bootrec.exe from Windows Recovery Command line (to get Windows working).

If you are unfamiliar with how partitions work, you can either read about 'Gparted', or you can create a partition in Windows for Ubuntu prior to installing using this link, or How do I install Ubuntu?

Note: You will also want to make a swap partition (this is used to 'swap' data from memory (RAM) to disk). Windows does this in a form of a swap file/page file. which for both operating systems is usually at least double diskspace to RAM size. I.E. 1MB RAM = 2MB Hard disk space.

You may also want to read about Dual Booting, which will also help explain somewhat how to do this.

You want to make sure that GRUB (the default bootloader for Ubuntu 12.04) is able to control your booting, as well as preserving the Windows bootloader as well. This is done by GRUB handling initial loading, then (after giving you an option to select Windows), will pass off to the Windows loader. Windows does not like other non-Windows operating systems so will at times overwrite other bootloaders, this is why you should install Windows first if you wish to have 2 systems. It is possible to do it in reverse, but often is more work. Windows 8 is worse in this manner, but enough of rant.

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