My son has been using LxMint12 and WinXP in a multi-boot system (two primary partitions on one hard drive) for a long time with BING 1.87 as Boot Manager (bootloader for LM12 in the root directory).
A few days ago I installed an additional LxMint17 partition (bootloader in LM17 root). My son frequently left a USB stick in its port without unmounting it between sessions. BING used to recognize it as HD-1. I mention this because I could imagine that this might be the starting point of the difficulties described hereafter(?).
After installation of LM17 my son did not boot the new OS but instead booted the familiar LM12 several times successfully from HD-0 (I do not know whether the USB stick was plugged in during these successful HDD boots). During one of those sessions I searched for the Thunderbird profile folder. Maybe I even had a look at GParted but nothing that in my opinion could have affected the partitioning scheme. Nevertheless the system was halted on reboot.
[img]http://up.picr.de/19177910kt.jpg[/img]
When rebooting with the BING 1.87 CD the only option I got was „Upgrade BootIt NG“. After some poking around in the fog (e.g. manually choosing the EMBRM partition or letting setup choose the partition, different restarts with the LM12 and 17 live DVD's with and without the USB stick in its port, resizing the EMBRM without changing the size and even deleting the EMBRM altogether) I got the additional BING options „Reactivate BootIt NG“ and „Capture MBR“. All attempts but the last to boot from the hard drive ended up in a system halt. „Capture MBR“ asked for a file name but I did not know what to put there. Whatever name I inserted led to an error. When I tried to install BIBM it even did not recognize my HDD.
[img]http://up.picr.de/19177911dt.jpg[/img]
[img]http://up.picr.de/19177912eu.jpg[/img]
At one specific time I even ended up with losing all partitions except one of the Linuxes plus the Linux Swap but succeeded in undeleting the other partitions plus some old rubbish.j
What can I do to repair the MBR and EMBRM? (unfortunately a backup of the EMBRM does not exist). The WinXP partition could be sacrificed. It is obsolete anyway and does not contain essential data.