Yeah, devious. The MBR is a royal pain in the ass to work with. I accidentally overwrote it when I installed GRUB, and despite XP not minding me doing this, Seven decided to go 'lol, hey, broken.'
I've already figured out what I need to do to fix it, but it's still making me giggle, while looking retrospectively. I have windows 7 home. I tried to recover using windows 7 professional. I should've known it wouldn't work, but it took me about 3 hours of various recovery methods before I realized I do indeed need a disc for windows 7 home.

I'm stuck without windows (on my laptop) for a few weeks until I can manage to get a hold of a disc, what ever will I do without it? Oh man.

I do have a question for someone who might know, though: if I decide to use the built in recovery functions for my laptop, does it essentially format the old disk, or, would I get the grace of keeping my data? I'm pretty sure it's the former, but if it's the latter, I wouldn't hesitate to try it (after making a list of everything that needs to be re-obtained and backing up pertinent data).

Whee, windows, and /loathe. Lots of /loathe. In fact, if I had a /loathe macro, I'd spam it. A lot.