[solved] No Grub Menu after Mint 12 install

[msd123]

I thought I'd post this just in case it helps anyone who is in a similar position, as I wasted hours Googling around before I finally guessed the answer.

I started with a Multiboot of XP, Mint 9 and VectorLinux with LILO in the MBR.

I wanted to install Mint 12 (from DVD) to overwrite Mint 9 with Grub in the MBR (I realised that would make it impossible to load Vector but I didn't really need that anyway).

Everything went well. I told the installation which partition to use and reused the Mint 9 swap partition. When I rebooted though, all I got was a "grub>" prompt.

I was able to boot into Mint 12 manually by issuing the appropriate CLI commands. I then ran "update-grub" and got a load of syntax errors. I purged and reinstalled Grub but nothing made any difference.

Finally, I wondered if the Vector partition was confusing Grub, so I went into the Disk utility and deleted that partition. Then I reran "update-grub" and this time got no errors. Rebooted and there was the menu .

[hal8000]

Thats one way to solve your problem, but it seems as though the grub2 os-prober script failed to correctly
identify your partitions.

This has happened to me on every distro with grub2. An alternative way is to disable os-prober and manually
create custome scripts in /etc/grub.2/40_custom This requires a little more work though, at least you found
a solution.

In the future you would need to post outputs of:

sudo fdisk -l

sudo cat /boot/grub/grub.cfg


The output of fdisk lists all partitions, and grub.cfg contains the configuration for grub2, as parsed by
os-prober.