Install Ubuntu without overwriting the MBR?

Installed Ubuntu on an external hard drive, messed up the mbr, fixed it, now takes forever to boot and log on?

• I got a hitachi 2TB hard drive and used my laptop to install Ubuntu (Linux-hopefully you already knew that) and made the mistake of installing the boot information of the Internal hard drive with Windows 7 on it. I went back, installed it right, and then i fixed the mbr on the laptop. It worked fine for a couple of days, but then it just started taking an incredibly long time to turn on and log on. I have tried fixing the boot stuff again and even tried one of those registry fixing programs, but it didn't help. I have tried using the system recovery disk and it failed. I am not quite sure what to do.

• Answer:

  i think you are confusing the issue by talking about two things. so keeping focused on just one thing then. 1) you had a laptop that was ok with windows 7 on it 2) you somehow stuffed the MBR. and then you say you fixed it. it would help if you said what you thought happened to the MBR and how you fixed it as we dont yet know how many other sectors got written. In future you should make sure that the bios setting that protects track 0 is enabled and that should have prevented you from doing this. 3) now a few days later the laptop has slowed down to a crawl, presumably something to do with the disk. This could easily happen if the file allocation table(the thing just after the MBR) gets a bit corrupted. this may make windows go very slow. In particular you should run a complete disk check so that it seeks out any file allocation errors. if you have even afew of these then its likely your MBR fix just wasnt good enough 4) the only other likely thing is that you have been unlucky and your laptop disk is damaged or dying and its just a coincidence this has happened now and is nothing to do with whats happened. so now back to basics. to check your laptop drive before you do any more messing about. enter the bios and run the disk test(the one thats safe to run and does not sanitize the disk) the bios test will thoroughly exercise the disk and will tell you if its good. if your bios does not have such a test then you may just have to rely on the windows thorough disk test which isnt so reliable since windows is in an unknown state. 1)if BIOS test is good then its very likely you need to install windows from scratch because things just are not right 2)if BIOS test is not good then that would be why a recovery would not work. reformat and reinstall the disk if you can otherwise if formatting fails its a new drive you need note: a recovery also might not work if the MBR fix that you did wasnt good enough or more disk sectors got corrupted as the recovery might be from a hidden partition on the drive which may no longer be correctly set in the MBR. typically recovery partitions fiddle with the MBR attributes to fool windows so that windows doesnt see them as valid thus hiding it and protecting your recovery data from being deleted. in other words if your disk is good it may need complete rebuilding anyway because you altered more than just the MBR i hope you understand what i have written.