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New to Mint - Grub woes and my plan of action

Posted: Sat Oct 23, 2010 1:54 pm
by Huw
Hi everyone. I just migrated to Mint from Ubuntu. I was using Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit. Initially I tried to install Debian 5.0.3 64-bit but had problems with Grub, despite telling it to just install Grub to the MBR at install time. Mint 8 worked fine, Mint 9 didn't. I think the theme here is that new distros are using Grub 2 and, for whatever reason, failing to install it in the MBR at install time. So I'm left running Mint 8 for now but I want to upgrade, so here's my plan of action.

I currently have two disks, with Windows 7 on the first and Mint 8 on the second. I intend to install Mint 9 in place of Mint 8, then boot into it from Super Grub Disk on a USB to get around the inevitable Grub problem. Then I'll simply run a grub-install and hopefully have a working, bootable multiboot system again.

Should that work? Is there anything I might have left out? Oh, and to preempt those who might suggest doing an in-place upgrade from 8 to 9 - for one thing, I'm pretty sure I'm running 32-bit 8 and I'd rather switch to 64-bit, plus I want to do this just for the experience and knowledge gained.

Thanks very much in advance!

Re: New to Mint - Grub woes and my plan of action

Posted: Sat Oct 23, 2010 2:02 pm
by caf4926
There is no reason why Mint 9's grub 2 should not work.

When it asks about grub installation, be sure to select the HD that is set to boot first in the BIOS.

Lets assume Win7 is on sda
Mint goes to sdb

Select sda for grub

Re: New to Mint - Grub woes and my plan of action

Posted: Sat Oct 23, 2010 2:58 pm
by Huw
Aha - thanks for your prompting; I now vaguely recall changing the boot order a long time ago! That has to be it - although that doesn't explain why some distros work and some don't, even though I tell all of them to install Grub in the same place.

But that must be it, so I'll give it a try later. Thanks again.