You should at least have a recovery partition on you computer. This one should be reached from BIOS.
Otherwise you can restart your machine with the Mint Live-CD and go in to the partitioner program (GParted). Check if you have the boot flag set to your external drive and if then, change to your Vista drive, the first one. This should be the reason why you have got the error 21. This means that BIOS can't find a bootable drive on your system. It must always be the first drive.
It will sometimes be some problem with having Linux separate on another drive, so why can't you have it on your Vista drive. Side by side?
Can't boot Linux or Vista! :(
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Re: Can't boot Linux or Vista! :(
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
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mcash454
Re: Can't boot Linux or Vista! :(
I had a similar problem, and when I booted to my Vista recovery partition it did not help at all. It merely reinstalled Vista, but didn't change the partitions or the mbr at all. So I was still unable to boot to anything.Nicki wrote:You should at least have a recovery partition on you computer. This one should be reached from BIOS.
What I ended up doing was booting to the Mint liveCD and deleting all the partitions that were associated with the linux installation. Then I reinstalled mint by manually setting up the partitions, which it sounds like you tried to do the first time.
I'm far from an expert, so my problem may have been different from yours. I think I had a GRUB 22 error, but am not 100% certain.
Re: Can't boot Linux or Vista! :(
Did you realy recover the disc "as it was from the factory"? This option should also replace mbr.mcash454 wrote:
I had a similar problem, and when I booted to my Vista recovery partition it did not help at all. It merely reinstalled Vista, but didn't change the partitions or the mbr at all. So I was still unable to boot to anything.
Re: Can't boot Linux or Vista! :(
No, you should mount the flag on your Vista disc. Not the Mint disc/partition.Cesc wrote:
[edit] so i un-flag'd lba and tried to reboot. now it says it's loading (without an error) but it take too long so i guess it doesn't really boot or just really take forever! my question now is, is there any way to delete grub via live cd, if yes, how do i do it? cause maybe i'll just go back to windows first and try to found out more about this whole external hdd installation stuff
Re: Can't boot Linux or Vista! :(
Sorry about that. This should work, so we need more help from the forum.
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mcash454
Re: Can't boot Linux or Vista! :(
Yeah, I did a full factory restore, but it did not eliminate my GRUB error. It was quite disappointing at the time, but I survivedNicki wrote: Did you realy recover the disc "as it was from the factory"? This option should also replace mbr.
