Strange Booting Problem

[Rotting]

OK, this will probably be easy for someone to figure out, but I'm totally new to Linux, so her e goes:

I had Vista installed, resized the partition, installed Mint on the other partition. After this GRUB automatically recognized Vista and had it set up in the "Other Operating Systems" menu. Both would boot fine, no problems at all. THEN, I decided to get smart and install OpenSUSE on a third partition just to try it out as well. It booted up fine, but was now using its GRUB. So, I followed a post in this forum and reset the GRUB to Mint's.

NOW we have problems (I probably did something wrong in the grub command line). Mint's GRUB appeared and would boot Mint, but not OpenSUSE or Vista. In fact, when I started Vista from that screen it gave me an ominous "Vista is missing some file winloader or something, you need to run a repair from the Vista Installation disk." So, I did that.

NOW, all the computer does it boot straight into Vista--no way to start either linux. How would I go about getting the Mint GRUB back and loading all three OSes?

Thanks a lot.

[lakehousetech]

You can look into downloading EasyBCD to your Vista OS. With EasyBCD you can configure the boot up options....add different OS's...etc. Then after configuring that, once you can boot into Mint again you could re-install grub if you want. Just an idea. Someone else here might have a better solution, but this should work fine for you. Good luck!

[Rotting]

Thanks for the advice.

I did that. I was able to boot back into Mint, reenabled GRUB, and Vista and Mint boot perfectly. Now, I'm stuck with another problem.

When I try to start OpenSUSE, I select it from Mint's GRUB screen, hit enter, and the screen goes black for half of a second, then goes right back to the Mint GRUB screen, with the countdown clock thing. I get the same response every time I select OpenSUSE. Any ideas?

Thanks for your time.

[Rotting]

OK, I think I've got it. I just copied the lines regarding OpenSUSE from its partition's menu.lst file, and it works well now. The only I have now, is that when I start Vista, I still get a black screen with white letters saying "Select Windows Installation to start: Windows Vista (recovered)" (which boots fine when I select it). I wish I could do away with that and just have it go straight into Vista, but this a linux forum, so I won't press on that too much.

[lakehousetech]

I had vista on dual boot at one time, and it did the same thing. I never bothered with trying to fix it. Glad you were able to work out the rest of it ok.