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An older Dell laptop (non PAE Inspiron 600m) with mint 13 xfce and windows xp. Decided to try lmde 32-bit MATE. Tried this three different ways - from a DVD, and from a couple of usb sticks. On the mint 13 installation I have separate /, /boot, and /home partitions. I first tried to install to / with formatting of that partition (/dev/sda9), and mounting the /home partition (/dev/sda8). I also tried installing everything to a newly formatted / (in a different partition). In each case, I okay'd installing grub to /dev/sda which is the laptop's hard disk. In each case upon reboot I end up in the recovery console. After going through the applicable recovery console steps: First set prefix=(hd0,6)/grub; Second set root=(hd0,6); Third insmod normal; Fourth normal. Then I boot from the mint 13 entry. After mint 13 is up, I go to CLI and do a sudo update-grub followed by a sudo grub-install /dev/sda. Then I reboot, choose the lmde entry and promptly get 3 warnings as follows:error no such device (with an UUID);error no such partition;error you need to load the kernel first;press any key to continue. This sequence (starting from the recovery console) occurred with all installation attempts.

Any ideas. Oh, and by the way, I did verify the md5sum and additionally this was from a torrent, and the problem occurred with 2 flash drives and one DVD. I'd guess that this is fixable by tweaking something in the grub cfg file, but I don't know what that something is.

I am pretty confused. I have seen some postings that indicated issues with bios ide uuid emulation but have not tracked them further. In further troubleshooting I have looked closer at the UUID issues and note the following:
1. UUID in the error message (see 1. below)
2. output of blkid (from the running mint 13 instance. (see 2. below)
3. applicable UUID info from grub.cfg in the running mint 13 instance. (see 3. below)

Does anybody have further troubleshooting ideas?

1,
The UUID that puts up with 'error no such device' is
6203c4d5-1b7a-4adf-a3ff-ebd66db410cf

2.
******output of bkid******
/dev/sda1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" LABEL="DellUtility" UUID="07D4-0A18" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sda2: UUID="E638A1A438A173E9" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda5: UUID="1ad7fb11-11d1-4453-9584-af2aa98b7a41" TYPE="ext2"
/dev/sda6: LABEL="1L-BOOT" UUID="8c602f32-25de-49d1-8bcc-e1ca86f0bb29" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sda7: UUID="cc068a22-6041-431e-9b96-b4c6c422ac9e" TYPE="ext2"
/dev/sda8: LABEL="HOME" UUID="d74b8047-6add-46f3-89b9-fec074b7bfbf" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda9: UUID="6203c4d5-1b7a-4adf-a3ff-ebd66db410cf" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda10: LABEL="1L-SLASH" UUID="423cc5a5-a505-4907-90f4-bd5fc5f58485" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda11: UUID="e47912d8-c0da-4aee-b8d3-586405a85a0e" TYPE="swap"

3.
*******os prober portion of grub.cfg*********
### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###
menuentry "Microsoft Windows XP Professional (on /dev/sda2)" --class windows --class os {
insmod part_msdos
insmod ntfs
set root='(hd0,msdos2)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root E638A1A438A173E9
drivemap -s (hd0) ${root}
chainloader +1
}
menuentry "LinuxMint GNU/Linux, with Linux 3.11-2-486 (on /dev/sda9)" --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
insmod part_msdos
insmod ext2
set root='(hd0,msdos9)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6203c4d5-1b7a-4adf-a3ff-ebd66db410cf
linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.11-2-486 root=UUID=6203c4d5-1b7a-4adf-a3ff-ebd66db410cf ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.11-2-486
}
menuentry "LinuxMint GNU/Linux, with Linux 3.11-2-486 (recovery mode) (on /dev/sda9)" --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
insmod part_msdos
insmod ext2
set root='(hd0,msdos9)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6203c4d5-1b7a-4adf-a3ff-ebd66db410cf
linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.11-2-486 root=UUID=6203c4d5-1b7a-4adf-a3ff-ebd66db410cf ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.11-2-486
}
set timeout_style=menu
if [ "${timeout}" = 0 ]; then
set timeout=10
fi
### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###

SOLVED It was a bios problem. From mint 13 I copied /dev/sda9's /boot to /dev/sda5; then modified /etc/fstab on /dev/sda9 to mount /dev/sda5 as /boot; then fixed the symbolic links for vmlinuz and the initrd image. Ran update-grub, rebooted and had lmde up and running. Basically the bios couldn't 'see' a partition that far out on the disk.