Boot Mint with WinXP Bootloader

[mill0001]

I have reinstalled Mint (Daryna) three times and still can't get grub to work. Tried "Supergrub" bootdisk and it does boot up Mint but doesn't fix the
problem.Is there a way I could copy grub to my boot drive and point Boot.ini of XP to it and have it boot Mint that way?

[merlwiz79]

What is the problem with grub?
Does it boot Mint?
Does it boot XP?

[mill0001]

For some wierd reason on my machine Daryna Mint seems to install from the live cd just fine, but when I reboot after install the Grub
menu is not there. Just the WinXP menu. I can boot to Mint using Supergrub but not without it. When I try to fix the linux boot with Supergrub
it tells me it succeeded, but I'm still gettin just the WinXP boot menu when I reboot. I went to the Ubuntu web page that tells how to fix Grub
and followed the steps and that didn't fix the problem either. So I still do not have the grub boot menu when I reboot the machine, altho when I
boot Mint with Supergrub disc it works just fine. I like the OS and would like to use it but having to boot with boot disc every time is really annoy-
ing to me.

[newW2]

Not much in the way of a description of what is happening. So here is something that can happen and is easy to check and correct:

You may be encountering a UUID miss-match problem. Grub won't do much for you when it happens. What to do to find out and fix it, if that's the problem.

Do the following in terminal:
Enter code:
sudo vol_id /dev/sdxy -u
Where x=a if the primary drive in a multi-drive rig, and y=the partition number of the drive (it's the location of the offending partition - I assume that is the partition you installed Mint on).
Note: If you are using IDE drives then the you would use: sudo vol_id/dev/hdxy

The output of this command will display the UUID of the drive (sdxy or hdxy). It's a good idea to run the id command for all the disk numbers and have them handy because you need to compare them to the UUIDs listed in the fstab file. To list and change the UUIDs listed in the fstab file do the following in a terminal.

Enter the following command in terminal to display fstab in a text editor:

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Compare the UUIDs in the fstab file listing with the list of UUIDs you got from the vol_id command. If you find one in fstab that isn't the same UUID as the the one listed by the vol_id command, edit the fstab UUID to match the vol_id command.

Personally, I agree with a previous Mod from the board: "UUID's make matters unnecessarily complicated by being "unique" ..." See this post. It will give you the rationale for why device names are preferred over the UUID strings.

http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopi ... 2001#25955

I hope this gets you up and running.

[merlwiz79]

Did you install grub to the MBR?

[mill0001]

I was under Impression that Mint automatically installed Grub to the MBR during installation of the system. I also did auto install with Supergrub more than
once. So what I still have is My winXP boot menu when I reboot the machine, no sign of Grub until I boot with SuperGrub disc. Many thanks to you newW2
for the thorough explanation of your theory of my problem. I will try those suggestions out tomorrow and post back my results. BTW the Mint OS is great once I
get booted into it. My XP still works fine as well.

[merlwiz79]

It does install to it to the MBR of sda, unless you use a /boot partition.
Did you change the hard drive order in the BIOS?
Or did you reinstall the XP MBR?
You could try WinGrub.
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p9.html

[mill0001]

Hey a very, very big Thank You to all who gave me suggestions here to get Mint working on my system. The problem was a quirk in my machine which I had forgotten about. I don't know why, but when
I try to install any OS on this box I have to unplug my secondary data drive which is a 100 gig Maxtor Ide drive. My boot drive is WD Raptor sata drive. I just unplugged the Maxtor finally (dummy me)
and repartitioned and reinstalled Mint and then plugged the Maxtor back in. Now everything is working just as it should and I am enjoying playing with my new Mint OS.Thanks again everyone for your
help. Problem solved> posting.php?mode=reply&f=46&t=8101#