I’ve been trying for some time now to get Windows 7 SP1 installed. It’s been failing with a somewhat weird error — apparently something about Windows not being in control of the MBR or something, which is probably true, since I’ve got GRUB handling that. Turns out it’s a relatively well-known problem and a little googling helped me solve it (it appears). The only problem is that all the solutions I found were overly complicated, at least for my needs, so here’s what I needed to do in order to get SP1 installed.
- Open “Computer Management” (open the Start menu and search for “computer management”), go to “Disk Management” and right click on the partition called “SYSTEM RESERVED” and mark it as active.
- Install SP1 either via Windows Update or by downloading the appropriate .exe from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5842.
That’s all really. Got SP1 running beautifully now with GRUB working and every OS (or rather “both” — Windows 7 and Ubuntu) booting properly. No need to mess around with Windows Recovery and Linux live-cds and stuff.