Installation Problem - Boot with XP and seperate Hard Drives

[DaSwine]

I've been searching through the forum and trying everything I can but I can't seem to get this working right.

I've installed Mint off the Live CD onto its own hard drive but I can't get it to boot. Whenever I boot the computer it goes straight to windows.

I've tried using wingrub, and manually repairing grub but neither has worked.

I just tried reinstalling Mint over top of itself and the installation said it completed fine but when I rebooted the machine I received a grub error #21.

All I want to do is dual-boot XP and Mint. XP is installed on hd0 and I installed Mint on hd2.

Is there an easy way to do this?

Thanks, in advance, for the help.

[keithp]

I run XP on one hard drive and Mint on the other. Both are normal installations, I just had to make certain that I didn't have the Mint MBR on the XP drive.

When the BIOS boots, I press F8 and I get a menu to select which hard drive or DVD drive I want to boot from. Some motherboards need F11 pressed.

Have no problems with this.

Hope this helps.

Keith

[Husse]

Are both disks internal?
Then it should just work - unless you install Win after Linux
It can be something with grub and we have a good wiki for that
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... _your_grub
Error 21 indicates to me that somehow you may have ended up in UUID hell
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... _a_problem
but as Mint from Daryna does not use UUID in grub I doubt it - but if it is Celena or earlier....
Please post you /boot/grub/menu.lst as this file is at the center of this

[DaSwine]

Thanks for the replies. I'm at work right now but as soon as I get home I'll post the /boot/grub/menu.lst

I'm using Daryna, and both disks are internal. I went through the grub wiki and re-installed grub before, that didn't work. I also tried to load it using wingrub.

Should I be loading grub on the drive with XP or onto the drive with Mint?

I would prefer to avoid having to boot through the bios and I know I can chain load grub from the XP boot menu by editing the boot.ini file, which I did, but I haven't been able to get grub to load. When I did this it gave me an error 16. That lead to my reinstalling Mint which than prompted the Error 21 and my having to repair the Windows MBR.

[atlef]

Take a look at my post here and see if that sorts you out.

atlef.

[Husse]

I think I now see the error here

XP is installed on hd0 and I installed Mint on hd2.

Nope!
This is the grub way, but you should have (hd0) = sda and (hd1) = sdb
Grub should be in the MBR of (hd0) if you want to do it the simplest way
Following the grub wiki
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... _your_grub
you should have (probably)
grub> root (hd1,1)
and
grub> setup (hd0)
Grub is hard to understand
I think you failure earlier can be explained along these lines

[DaSwine]

Okay, I think I understand what is going on here.

Somehow I am in UUID hell, not sure why, but I think it is because I have 2 IDE drives and 1 SATA drive. The SATA drive is my boot drive and has XP on it. I installed Mint to one of the IDE drives. In looking things over I've noticed the sdx designators changing.

Right now my /boot/grub/menu.lst is:
title Linux Mint, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic
root (hd2,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=/dev/sdc1 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
boot

title Linux Mint, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd2,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=/dev/sdc1 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
boot

title Linux Mint, kernel memtest86+
root (hd2,0)
kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin
boot


However, when I booted my machine this time the Mint drive was sdb1 and no longer sdc1.

So from what I understand I'm going to have to edit fstab and menu.lst, right?

[DaSwine]

So, I tried editing my fstab and my menu.lst to point to the proper drives, however I still received an Error 21 so I must have done something wrong.

So I am now lost again, here is all the information I can think is relevant. This is current as of my current live CD bootup, which I will leave running for now so as not to confuse things further:
grub Drive Type Name in GParted What's on it
hd0 SATA sda Win XP
hd1 PATA sdb Storage
hd2 PATA sdc Mint

my menu.lst is:

Code: Select all

title      Linux Mint, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic
root      (hd2,0)
kernel      /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=/dev/sdb1 ro quiet splash
initrd      /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
boot

title      Linux Mint, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic (recovery mode)
root      (hd2,0)
kernel      /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=/dev/sdb1 ro single
initrd      /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
boot

title      Linux Mint, kernel memtest86+
root      (hd2,0)
kernel      /boot/memtest86+.bin
boot

and my fstab is:

Code: Select all

# /dev/sdb1
#UUID=af8425fb-b6ee-44bf-8321-93bcf5d193dc
/dev/sdb1 /               ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /dev/sdb5
#UUID=5413c7d7-592f-46aa-a6a4-90f70b73c6ab
/dev/sdb5 none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec 0       0

Sorry for the hassles, and thanks for the help?

Would it just be easier for me just to create a partition and install Mint on the SATA drive, or will I still run into this UUIB Hell (which really is hell, but a good learning experience).