Restore your Windows MBR with a Linux live-CD

Ooops.  I crunched the MBR on my laptop so it wouldn't boot into Windows any more.  In fact it wouldn't boot into anything else either!  Something went wrong with an Ubuntu installation and Grub ended up somewhat confused.  The fix was relatively straightforward, once I stopped chasing the suggestions about using ms-sys, which appears to have disappeared from recent Ubuntu distros.  Instead I did this:-

• boot from Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) live-CD
• connect to internet
• sudo apt-get install lilo
• sudo lilo -M /dev/sda mbr

On reboot, the laptop went into Windows once again.  Phew!

Many thanks to the contributors to this discussion.