mint not booting properly at all

[timmmy]

Posted this at the end of a thread i was reading earlier on but i think my problem may be different so, new thread!

HI,

having same problem as above but cant seem to solve it with what i've found so far. I can only get to a command line by booting recovery mint linux(daryna)... I have a dual boot set up mint & XP pro with 4 main partitions (first one is dell utility, second is XP, third is extended for linus mint [holds / , /home & /swap] and fourth partition is an NTFS formatted for XP). I have installed Mint light. When I turn on PC its doesnt automatically go to the grub menu, it give me a screen with linux mint background pic and a text box in top left corner that look a bit like this:
/ ----- pstk------------------rstk--- \
: :
: :
: :
: :
:0 5ffae. a :
:1 5ff8a. a :
:2 2c244. 4 :
:3 147. 9: 0: fffffff. 5:
:4 a. 1: 1: 1462. 5:
\--------------------------------------/

pressing enter then takes me to the grub menu where i can adequately boot into XP.

When I try to boot to linux Mint however there are a few problems...
something only happens when booting into recovery mode (ie normal boot fails miserably)

then i get a few bad file names in sda1 (the dell utility drive I think) with error message
fsck died with exit status 8
[fail]
*File system check failed.

i get a shell in recovery mode but pressing ctl-D doesnt boot normally as suggested by the messages...

what gives? any quick fix? is the dell utility partition causing problems? I noticed when I was making partitions in gparted from live CD that there was a triangle with ! beside the dell utility drive. Is the problem related to this in any way?
why is linux even having a look at that partition if i contained mint to sda3-6?
Anyone with suggestions?

[timmmy]

okay... new development. I changed the /etc/fstab following this in the wiki http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... _a_problem

commenting out the UUID seems to have done something positive:
selecting the linux mint OS option got me to the log in screen. However after putting in username and password there is a permission problem with the $HOME/.dmrc file??? its telling me the $HOME directory must be owned by user and have 644 permissions...

this leads to something about GTK+ initialisation problems and thence no login and no session. Failsafe gnome session gives identical result. i am able to get to the terminal with the failsafe terminal session. here I changed the ownership of $HOME (/home/me) to 644 (sudo chown 644 /home/me) and exited and tried logging in again...to no avail. same thing happens again and im brought back to the login screen (which looks slick by the way you mint developpers )

also, there is still the weird screen after powering on PC as described above with the need to press enter twice to reach grub menu.

Anyone??




no go

[timmmy]

OK a little more info on this liggle major problem here. When I installed this is what I did:

I manually re-partitioned the hard drive from the live CD gparted:
- shrunk the two windows partitions
- made a new extended partition into which i then made two ext3 partitions and a swap partition.

i then went to manual install from the live CD and made one of the ext 3 partitions /root and one of them /home while the swap was detected automatically as swap. Could the permission and login problem stem from this tinkering? I am fairly new to linux (have xubuntu 7.10 running sweetly on my laptop not a bother since december last) and id like to get mint looking good and working on me desktop, so please, anyone with ideas on how i can fix this????

[timmmy]

AH come on guys... some help... please?