The context is that he is tech illiterate. So much so that I tried to get him to just use a gui tool on his windows notebook to put Ubuntu on a 2GB flash drive

The context is that he is tech illiterate. So much so that I tried to get him to just use a gui tool on his windows notebook to put Ubuntu on a 2GB flash drive to save his files but he couldn't do it. There is no way he would have been able to boot to the Windows recovery CD command prompt and run anything. Also, I'm pretty sure the boot repair on the disk runs bootmgr repair options during its "please wait were doing stuff and not telling you what is going on" phase.