Mint won't boot

[pvtryan]

I'm dualbooting Win7 and Mint 10, each on their own disk. Mint will not boot. It was working fine a couple days ago, but now only Windows is working.

When I tried to boot Mint recovery mode some of the last lines were:

Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:
[here it listed four things]
-
-
-
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ALERT! /dev/disk/[long, seemingly random stream of numbers and letters] does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

I think that it could be a GRUB (GRUB 2) problem because when I booted up this morning GRUB did not have the 5-second timeout it was supposed to have. Minor things like this have happened to me in the past — once, by itself, it changed the default boot to memtest, and I had to change it back with the StartUp-Manager.

I would try using the StarUp-Manager or running sudo grub-mkconfig with my live CD, except that my live CD will not boot. The drive seems to be fine, because I just tested it with The Fellowship of the Ring.

The only thing I have changed recently (to my knowledge) is my CMOS battery, yesterday. Windows is working fine, and it can see the drive that Mint is on (meaning the drive IS connected and does exist!).

Thanks for the help.

[donec]

Is your drive marked as bootable in your bios?

[pvtryan]

I don't know. How do I tell?

[pvtryan]

I was able to boot a live CD in compatibility mode just now. It gave me a command line. I ran "sudo fdisk -l" and it showed me that somehow my linux partition changed from sda1 to sdf1. I guess all I have to do is change GRUB.

I tried installing GRUB in the command line and running "sudo grub-mkconfig," but no dice.

How can I fix this via command line and why isn't the live CD working normally?

[pvtryan]

I got both my live CD and my installation by adding

Code: Select all

irqpoll acpi=off noapic

to the kernel line.

Also, I read somewhere that irqpoll takes a performance hit. Is there any way to fix this?

Can someone please explain to me why I would need this now, when I did not need it before?

Thanks.