Dual boot system failure - Man and Machine tale

I have get a computer with relatively small HDD (only 80GB). It hosts Windows and Linux OS with GRUB boot manager. I needed more disk space so I decided to remove linux, and create new NTFS partition in that place. It looks simple. So I run the partition manager and checked what is what. First 100MB small partition looked like linux boot directory. Next was windows and then linux and swap partitions. Easy. Remove linux and windows partitions, format. All done. I played with Windows settings and decided to reboot.

Then I saw my mistake. I accidentally removed GRUB stage and config files with linux partition. The first one partition does not contain those needed files. I should check it more thoroughly. It sucks. I suck.

The first thought was, get the windows CD and rewrite master boot record with windows boot loader. But I have no cd/dvd drive in that machine. I don't have spare one in that location. But I have my laptop and USB pen drive. So maybe another option. I will install small linux distro as a power utility and reinstall GRUB. That's I like more.
The first thing I tried to do was creating bootable USB flash drive. I have used couple boot images, and Puppy Linux distro, different BIOS settings - my machine does not allow me to boot from USB. Not good.

So I decided to boot windows by manually configuring GRUB. After little research and experimenting I have booted into Windows. Now every time I want to boot that machine I have to:

• get into GRUB prompt by pressing 'e' key
• write GRUB commands

root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader --force +1
boot

Nice "hacker" style setup. It was definitely not finished yet.

I next part I write how I made that system more usable.