Restoring Bootup from Mint Partition

[Harm D]

I was able to create a new partition and install Mint on my Athlon system, which had Windows Vista installed from the factory. The Mint install left me with the bootup option of loading either either Vista or Mint.

I decided to remove Vista and downgrade to XP which I was able to do. In the course of doing that I reformatted the C: partition.

Now, I can see the Mint partition from XP disk manager but the boot loader is gone so I cannot boot from it. I assume I wiped that when I formatted the C: drive and installed XP.

Can anyway suggest a way to restore the ability to boot Mint?

Best regards

Harm

[Fred]

Harm D,

There are a number of ways to go about doing this. I would suggest this.

Go to the Supergrub site and download the iso and burn it. This is a handy disk to have around. You can use it to boot into almost any system. Don't be tempted to try to "fix" the system with this disk. Just use it to boot with.

Use Supergrub to boot into your Mint 4 install. Open a terminal and type:

sudo grub

kernel (hd0,1)

setup (hd0)

quit

This assumes that your Mint 4 /boot is on sda2 and you are booting from the first hard drive, which you probably are.

Then open gedit by typing in a terminal:

sudo gedit

Navigate to a file called /etc/fstab and open it. Find the line for your ntfs windows partition and see what it is called. It will probably be sda1. Just below that you will see a string of letters/numbers. This is a UUID number. It is wrong.

Open a terminal and type:

sudo vol_id -u /dev/sda1

It will return a string of letters/numbers. Replace the wrong UUID in /etc/fstab with correct one you just calculated.

Save this file and quit everything and reboot. It should work now.

Fred

[atlef]

I prefer this method:

Boot your LinuxMint Live CD, start a terminal when logged in the live session.
Enter : sudo grub
you then get the grub> promt.
Enter : find /boot/grub/stage1

This will return a location.
Next, THIS IS IMPORTANT, whatever was returned for the find command use it in the next line(you are still at the grub> promt when issuing the next three commands)
Enter root (hd?.?) depending on what the find command returned, i.e. (hd0.1) then you enter this: root (hd0.1)

Next enter : setup hd0 to install to the mbr.
Then exit by entering : quit

That is it.

Now reboot, and Bob should be your uncle.

atlef.

[Fred]

atlef,

Don't forget , he needs to correct his UUID in fstab also. He reinstalled Windows.

The only downside I see to your method is when he is done he won't have Supergrub laying around to boot with if he makes a mistake and nothing will boot.

Fred

EDIT: You are right about using the find command. I just assumed he knew what partition his /boot file was on. Of course I forgot for a moment how the word "assume" is spelled.

[Harm D]

These suggestions are much appreciated and I will study them carefully - Thank you. It seems to me that it may be just as easy for me to re-install Mint, since I did not have any data stored on the Mint partition.