Installed Mint then boot freeze

[caddict]

i recently installed linux mint xfce on my second machine - it ran perfectly - once...

on reboot there was a freeze at the bios screen. after some trial and error, i can get the machine to boot and start windows normally if i disconnect the drive containing the new mint install - curious, any ideas?

fairly old asus board with an 1800MHz sempron, three ide drives, two with windows stuff (primary master and primary slave) and the third (problematic, secondary master) with the new mint installation

i installed grub on to the root partition and not onto the mbr of drive 3 (sdc).

a theory: if drive 3 is marked as bootable, but has an empty MBR, no boot is possible...

[Kilz]

Have you ran any diagnostic software on the drive? Simply installing software on a drive should not make the bios lock up.

[xenopeek]

i installed grub on to the root partition and not onto the mbr of drive 3 (sdc).

a theory: if drive 3 is marked as bootable, but has an empty MBR, no boot is possible...

Yes, this will not allow you to boot. You should install a multi-bootloader into the MBR of the first harddisk if you want to be able to switch between Windows and Linux for example. Normally, you would install GRUB to /dev/sda. You could still do that, boot from the Live image and install Boot Repair and use that to install GRUB to /dev/sda.

You will need network access to do this. From the terminal:

Code: Select all

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install boot-repair-ubuntu

Then run the program. There are some tips on usage here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

[caddict]

@kilz - i definitely would like to do this but at this point i cannot get the machine to boot if that drive is connected at all ...

@vincent - the reason why i installed grub to /dev/sdc1 was because i use a master boot manager (BootIt BM). which is installed on one of the other drives. but whenever sdc is connected, with or without other drives, bios freezes. even with the live-CD in place (bios order is correct)

i do suspect the drive of bad behaviour, but i am trying to eliminate other possible reasons first

i will try some more disk combinations and jumper settings to see if i can examine that drive with the live-CD