Windows 7!!!! damn you!!

My new laptop was working jussstttt fine until I gave a thought about it working "just fine." Then the Murphy's law came into force. An overview, mine is a dell 1520 inspiron 2007 vintage (cost me 62k!!! with all the upgrades) with a fantastic configuration and a cool insurance cover. I was told that if anything were to happen to my sweet lappy, I can get it replaced! Yeah baby! replaced! Anyway, that insurance cover was for only one year, so it got lapsed last December.
I was caught in the buzz of Windows 7 beta testing, and I decided to give it a try. A little overview, my laptop came with installed windows. However, I am a fan of Ubuntu, so I got Ubuntu installed with a dual-boot option. Little I knew at that time, any kind of installation change will break the master boot record of Dell.
All I did was mount the Windows 7 cd, and my whole boot record got corrupted! Like a deer caught in the headlights( a line I picked from the serial "XIII", one of my favo comic book story of all time!!), I tried to fix it, but in the end I just made it worse.
I had to do a fresh install of my OS!! I was feeling damn pissed about that as I had my machine really customized. However, I was sane enough to put all the data in a separate partition, and also to have periodical back-ups on DVD drive. So all i had to do was reinstall the OS, reinstall the drivers, update OS definitions (easily the most irritating part!) and regenerate links! And tada!...I got my laptop back!!

So guys, some lessons from my experience

1. Any kind of repartitioning the hard drive(s), dual-OS, manual changes to boot records will erase the factory shipped MBR of dell. This means that you cannot press ctrl+11 and expect to have your factory shipped image of your computer restored.


2. Windows 7 doesn't recognize many drivers! You have to run it in vista compatability mode, or sometimes even at XP compatability mode.


3. If you are doing a fresh install on the same hardrive or even in a different hard drive, and you want all the dell's factory settings restored take a look at the following links.
   
   To restore dell's media center partition:
   
   
   • Dell Support
   
   
   
   • Anything related to dell, excellent source! was very helpful
   
   
   
   

Drop in a comment if you need any specific answers! And yeah, don't forget to read the dell's manual and its EULA so that you don't complain about it later :)

p.s: Currently I am using only XP as my OS. I have installed virtualbox from sun, and inside virtual box, I got my Ubuntu running. Try virtualbox sometime, it is awesome! Enough of all that dual-boot nonsense!