dual booting pclos and mint

[Husse]

@ MALsPa
It works in the installer as it "rewrites" the /dev/sdax to (hd0,x)

[MALsPa]

It works in the installer as it "rewrites" the /dev/sdax to (hd0,x)

Ah!

OK, I guess we're on the same page, then. Now that you mention it, that sounds familiar, I may have noticed it being changed, and that the installer "translated" it. That part didn't make it into my notes, but I'll add it.

[mikej]

hi all just dropping in to give an update on my unsuccessful attempts to install. i've redownloaded the iso, burned a few times (slowly) and made numerous attempts at getting the bootloader set up. the live cd runs perfectly, everything detected etc. after being unsuccessful when installing by trying to put grub into root, (hd0,9), and a few other various incantations of the same, i decided to let mint install it in the mbr as is the default (hd0). i expected to boot up to the mint grub screen, but instead got the grub error 13. so, i rebooted and lo and behold there's my pclos grub still intact. booted into pclos, mounted the partition where mint is installed in, opened up the grub folder, and there was no menu.lst even in there. which makes me think that for some reason, grub isn't installing at all. wondered whether I'd messed up my partition table or something like that, so I pulled out a gutsy alt disc and installed it to the mint partition. and it works fine. I'm kinda at a loss now what to try.

[MALsPa]

mikej -- Sorry to see that it hasn't worked out. You might want to provide more details, like pasting your menu.lst, etc., and detailing the steps you're taking. This page might be of help to you: http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/gnu/grub/h ... ub_13.html

I had more trouble with Mint than with the other distros on my system, but in the end it was worth it, so hopefully you'll keep trying. Hopefully the more experienced folks here can point you in the right direction. Write everything down -- well, so often I wish I would have written everything down! Good luck!

[Husse]

@ mikej
Even if grub error 13 suggest otherwise - what kind of hardware do you have (forgive me if this is mentioned somewhere - to muchto read )
On a mac the gfxgrub Mint is using can't be used....
So try to install a standard grub from the supergrub disk (google for it - it's just a 5 MB download)

[mikej]

hi there. the machine is a dell xps desktop.
P4 3.2g
1gig ddr2
nvidia 6800
syncmaster 941bw 19 inch widescreen
haven't given up yet, just continuing on with my reading and research into this issue. in the meantime I think i've found a different problem. haven't tried mint yet so i wasn't familiar with their installer. what i did do is dug out a 3.0 cd that i burned a while back and installed it. the install went fine and it is running on my puter now. what i did notice from doing that is that when i attempt to install 4.0, the installer finishes too early, before the bootloader is actually installed. the install box drops out around 94% or so, and you don't see the "installing bootloader" dialogue. i read another thread where this was happening to some others as well, with no resolution however. I do have supergrub, and did try to install grub after the fact, but got some feedback that said files not there or something to that effect.

[Husse]

OK had we known it's a Dell we might have saved us some thinking
Look at the Daryna release notes
http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_daryna.php
at the end "Known issues"
Unfortunately with a Dell recovery partition you may have to tweak the install considerably

On computers with Dell Recovery Partitions: Manual Install might not work in the liveCD installer. To fix this issue: "apt purge ubiquity; apt clean; apt install ubiquity" then perform the installation and restore the sources.list from the liveCD to the installed system.

[mikej]

yes i had read the release notes about Dell, and viewed that other thread about same. i didn't think it applied however if i had formatted my drive and wasn't running the computer with a recovery partition. anyways i did redo the install per release notes, and same thing happened. same situation as in this thread viewtopic.php?f=46&t=8401&p=52226&hilit=installer+dies#p52226
however, unfortunately the fixes suggested haven't worked for me. i really appreciate the time and effort for the responses i've recieved. nothing serious here, it's not a main work system or anything. just wanting to give this distro a run. i'm thinking i may have to wait for a new release and try again, however, i will keep tabs here and see if any answers pop up. if so, i will post a solution. thanks again.

[cogDis]

It works in the installer as it "rewrites" the /dev/sdax to (hd0,x)

Ah!

OK, I guess we're on the same page, then. Now that you mention it, that sounds familiar, I may have noticed it being changed, and that the installer "translated" it. That part didn't make it into my notes, but I'll add it.

There is a bug in Ubiquity that has been present in Ubuntu Iive CDs and derivatives since Feisty. It only manifests itself under certain hardware configurations, (frequently dual sata Nforce) and usually only when you direct grub to install to the boot block of the root partition. Using the /dev/sdx syntax was the only way I have found to work around the issue. Sounds like it worked for you too. In my case, using the standard grub notation, the install would consistently fail at 90% immediately prior to the grub installation phase. It appears that the grub scripts would just silently fail, usually creating an incomplete menu.lst file, or sometimes failing to complete the /boot directory structure completely. Sometimes I was able to boot the failed installation by bringing up the kernel directly, other times, not.

I stumbled upon the /dev/sdx solution by trial and error. Since then all of my installs have been trouble free on my machines.

Glad you got it to work.

CD

[Husse]

I'm rewriting the grub wiki and perhaps you'll find something there
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... _your_grub

[Fred]

cogDis,

Thank you sir. That clarifies several situations I never could get a good handle on.

Good post, thanks again.

Fred