Now I somehow really screwed things up so that I can't boot into mint. I feel pretty stupid because the work around (typing swapon each boot) was working fine. I thought I'd try reformatting the swap partition and see if that had did anything. I opened gparted and reformated. This gave me a new UUID for sda4. I edited fstab to chang the uuid and rebooted. oops. Not booting anymore. I got a black screen saying, no bootable device detected insert one. I put in my live cd and nothing happened. I had to power down and try again. When I restarted I thought I'd check if rEFIT needed to resync my tables like it did when I first installed. It suggests changing my mbr from "efi protective" on my whole disk to something that looks more like my partition table: ee efi protective, af mac os x, hfs+, 83 linux, 82 linux swap.
Not sure what this means or if it gives a clue about what went wrong. I went ahead and accepted the resync but couldn't boot. This time I got tux penguin on the screen and nothing happened. I tried again from rEFIT with the live cd but the same thing happened (penguin!)
Should I repost this as a new problem? Is this a problem with rEFIT you think? Should I try and reinstall it? I'm not sure I will be able to reinstall mint because rEFIT isn't letting me boot from cd. I'll try that again holding down C. Edit: this (holding c) worked. I am going to try re-installing Grub from the live dvd when I next have the time. It looks like this is what the problem is judging from these forums:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351
http://www.av8n.com/computer/htm/grub-reinstall.htm
maybe I am totally wrong. If that is case and some one wants to warn me before I try, I will be grateful. If it doesn't work I'll try a clean install.
I got this from partition inspector in osx
Code: Select all
*** Report for internal hard disk ***
Current GPT partition table:
# Start LBA End LBA Type
1 40 409639 EFI System (FAT)
2 409640 801234823 Mac OS X HFS+
3 801496968 972054535 EFI System (FAT)
4 972316680 976510983 Linux Swap
Current MBR partition table:
# A Start LBA End LBA Type
1 1 409639 ee EFI Protective
2 409640 801234823 af Mac OS X HFS+
3 * 801496968 972054535 83 Linux
4 972316680 976510983 82 Linux swap / Solaris
MBR contents:
Boot Code: Unknown, but bootable
Partition at LBA 40:
Boot Code: None (Non-system disk message)
File System: FAT32
Listed in GPT as partition 1, type EFI System (FAT)
Partition at LBA 409640:
Boot Code: None
File System: HFS Extended (HFS+)
Listed in GPT as partition 2, type Mac OS X HFS+
Listed in MBR as partition 2, type af Mac OS X HFS+
Partition at LBA 801496968:
Boot Code: GRUB
File System: ext4
Listed in GPT as partition 3, type EFI System (FAT)
Listed in MBR as partition 3, type 83 Linux, active
Partition at LBA 972316680:
Boot Code: None
File System: Unknown
Listed in GPT as partition 4, type Linux Swap
Listed in MBR as partition 4, type 82 Linux swap / Solaris