Dual boot setup - Mint hangs on boot...[Problem Solved]

[DanielTx]

I have an XP / Mint Daryna dual boot pc that is now having problems booting into Linux. It gets as far as the Mint graphic, but the progress bar never moves. Everything was working a few weeks ago, but I have since finished setting up the PC for my XP stuff. The last message on boot up is regarding the DVD drive, I did unplug my multicard reader since I don't think I have booted Mint since that was installed.

Where do I look for errors? I can't find any logs under /var/logs. Would booting from the Live CD prove anything or help me see any errors?

Thanks,
Daniel

[Husse]

I guess you can boot into "Recovery mode"
Please note that you are root there and you must be careful and never use startx
If you manage to boot into "Recovery mode" then do

nano /boot/grub/menu.lst

Find the line that boots Mint normally. It looks something like

/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=/dev/sda7 ro quiet

Delete quiet and save the changed file - then reboot (normal boot)
Now you can see whats happening and where the boot stops. This tells a lot about the possible error.
You can do it from the live CD as well.

[DanielTx]

I get the same thing in recovery mode. I can remove the quiet splash setting on the grub menu, I'll do that again and then post the last step of the boot process. I think the last step was at my cdrom/dvd burner, but that hardware hasn't changed since everything worked.

[DanielTx]

I remembered that I plugged in several devices at the end of my PC build. What appears to be the problem is my 2nd hard drive(it's IDE, the first - where xp and mint are installed is SATA). Mint or grub is trying to boot from my 2nd drive thinking it is the master I guess? It's a seagate barracuda and I don't have any jumper pins in it...What do I need to change to make mint boot from the SATA drive with both plugged in?

[DanielTx]

After reading a lot of message boards, I found that even though my hard drive boot order was set correctly in my bios, the bios was recognizing the IDE drive first, then the SATA. So the SATA drive is now sdb since I have the second drive plugged in.

I had to change /boot/grub/menu.lst to look for the linux kernel on sdb3 instead of sda3. I guess I'll need to remember this if I ever take out the IDE drive or replace it with a SATA drive.

Thanks for the help.

[Husse]

Just a remark to help people with mixed SATA/PATA
The boot order is set within each group and the boot order of the two groups is not possible to change - it's hard coded in the motherboard. First mostly PATA had priority now all boards with PATA has it as second in boot order