(Solved)System will not boot - please help

[germanix]

I did it again! I fumbled with the system and now cannot boot. I was running Mint 10 and wanted to try out LMDE. I formatted the HD then installed LMDE. All went well but the update after the install would not work properly. I followed some advice and updated via apt-get in the terminal. Here things started going wrong. After the distro-update I could not boot anymore. Then decided to give up on LMDE and return to Mint 10. I re-formatted the HDD by using a Gparted live disk and then booted from the Mint 10 live disk. It boots up and starts to load but then just stops before the upload is completed. Tried it a couple of times. I also tried to boot from the LMDE live disk but same problem.
I am now at my wits end. I do have a full back-up and a clone of Mint 10 on an external HDD but I do not know how to get the laptop to boot from the external drive.
I have a sony viao laptop.
Any help and advice will be appreciated. Thanks.

System booting again, problem solved. Thanks.

[Oscar799]

Glad you found a solution