Repairing/restoring a MBR

I'm working with MS on my W7 SP1 update failures on a Dell with OEM partitions. They had me borrow a W7 DVD to do a upgrade/repair install. After all the transfering, merging, etc. it hung in Windows network setup and always returned to that same point after a repeated reboots. Couldn't boot into safe mode either.

I used the HDM2011S WinPE disc to restore my HD image for the first time ever and I was running again.

Later I thought that maybe just restoring the MBR and/or the first track "may" have allowed me to boot into windows to correct the setup.

I was in a self infected no boot situation before and repairing MBR from the WinPE disc still failed. This may be a Dell quirk similiar to the Windows created repair disc failing to boot.

I know that there are other ways like using BCDEDIT on a saved MBR file but I assume that one could use a backup of just the MBR and/or first track only, correct?

 

Not likely.

MBR contains disk code and partition table.

bootmgr and bcd are on the Active partition.

 

Ah! I have confused the two, then using BCDEDIT would be my only solution.