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How to Reinstall Mint6

Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2009 11:31 pm
by ajg to iampa
Well...I've been using Mint for about 3 weeks now (I love it) and installed it on my HDD so that it would dual boot with Vista. Somehow, while messing around with the settings, I screwed something up so that now when I boot into Mint via Grub, all i get is a prompt...it doesn't load the Gnome desktop. Thinking that maybe it was just Gnome that I screwed up, I tried doing an apt-get install gnome from that prompt and only got errors (I found that in an internet search to try and solve this problem). I'm new to Linux so don't have a lot of background using the command prompt anyway. Since I've only been "learning" on Mint for the past few weeks, I don't mind loosing my settings and starting over.

What I'd like to do is just boot to mint from a live CD and reinstall it to my HDD. I noticed it made 2 partitions during its first install, 1 primary and 1 swap. The problem I'm having is that when I try to just redo the install, it wants to make even more partitions and won't let me just install over whats already there. I'm afraid to delete or format the partitions because that might screw up GRUB so that my Vista won't even boot.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Re: How to Reinstall Mint6

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 12:31 am
by steve9199
You should be fine installing over the old install. I tanked my Mint installation and had to redo it. (learn as you go...lol)

Just make sure not to change anything in the NTFS partition and you should be fine. GRUB will reinstall from the live CD.

-Steve

(NooB, but learning.)

Re: How to Reinstall Mint6

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 9:25 am
by ajgiampa
So if I just delete the partitions and then reinstall, will windows still boot? I was under the impression that GRUB was installed on one of the linux partitions..which is why I was hesitent to just delete the linux partions. I don't want to mess up anything more than I already have (although it is a great learning experience!!...I never thought I'd be delving this deep in HDD partition stuff!)

Re: How to Reinstall Mint6

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 10:13 am
by proxima_centauri
Yea, you don't even need to "delete" per say, as in deleting before installation.
All you need to do is to a manual install and select the same partitions already being used for "/" and SWAP and format them.
Grub will install along with the installation and should recognize windows and give you the option to boot to.

Re: How to Reinstall Mint6

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 11:13 pm
by ajgiampa
Well, the re-install worked well. Thanks for the tips. I'm definately more confident now to mess around with the advanced features of linux now that I know its so easy to "start over". I'd definately recommend that others not be intimidated by this...