Ubuntu Windows Dual boot on the same drive problem

Question

Here's what I did

1. I have an SSD and regular hard drive
2. I installed Ubuntu 13.10 on SSD and Windows on the regular hard drive everything is in harmony

3. Then created another partition on the SSD and installed Windows on that partition (because Windows on the regular hard drive is giving me horrible performance)

4. Now my Thinkpad T430 will boot directly into Windows

My questions are

1. How can I still boot into my Ubuntu? because I need to retrieve important files.

2. If the above is not doable, then Can I still boot into the Windows on the regular hard drive? I made a backup of ubuntu there. I should still retrieve files from that backup.

Any help, feedback and suggestions are greatly appreciated

thanks so much Shawn

Answer 1

Your Windows installation overwrote MBR with its own data - hence it boots directly to Windows. You have to reinstall grub in MBR and then add your Windows to the menu in it, the best.

In order to do that you can use rescue/live cd to boot into Linux.

In case you only want to retrieve your data from Linux partition you also can use LiveCD or basically do that in your Windows, using some tools to read Linux filesystem(s) - I guess it would be ext2/3/4.