Linux Mint Forums

Hello everyone

Forgive me, but my knowledge and vocabulary with Linux is very very limited. I will try to be as clear as possible when describing my problem... so please bear with me, I really want to get Mint to work on my system

I am a returning "Trying it Out" user that is having a lot more problems this time around than the first time I tried Linux Mint back when 3.0 was out. I also NEED to keep my installation of winXP, but I won't waste your time with my reasons.

The installation runs well but my problem is with GRUB. I have installed the O/S various times and get different issues with GRUB. Here is a list of some of them;
- never shows up... goes straight to my winXP O/S. (when installed to sdc)
- stalls and just says the word - GRUB (when installed to sdb)
- gets to a point that it just fills my screen with the word GRUB. (also when installed to sdb)

I have even tried to install GRUB to a floppy (fd0) but Mint won't allow it, it gives me an error at the end of the installation when I tried to do this. This was something that I did in version 3.0 and it worked like a charm, whenever I wanted to boot to Mint, I would just insert the floppy and pick my O/S. I don't know why this option is not available anymore considering that it eliminated the "FEAR" of messing with the MBR... which I thought I had lost until I found out how to recover it using a win98 floppy.

Please, any ideas on what I'm doing wrong? It seems like a really eye catching distro that I would love to experiment with... because there is only so much you can do on the live cd.

Thanks in advance and I am really sorry for the loooong post

m

This may help:

Super Grub Boot Disk , download the .iso image from here : http://www.supergrubdisk.org/

Burn the image to a cd disk & boot from it.

The menu is extensive , & will allow you to fix problems with the grub boot located on the MBR.

Read all of the menu options & the help files on the disk & Backup your current grub, just in case you mess it up.

Hopefully this will help, I have used it many times for dual & triple boot configs, with great results.

The website has lots of info,
I hope this helps,
Jay514

Hi Jay

thanks for the reply

I went ahead and tried SuperGrub and everything seemed fine. I selected MBR & !LINUX! auto (no questions asked) and I was presented with a GRUB menu. I thought this was it... it was fixed, but when I went to reboot the computer, I was back with a prompt constantly typing out the word GRUB. I then reinserted the SuperGrub floppy, went to the same selection, MBR & !LINUX!, got the GRUB menu back, proceeded to try my winXP O/S and now get "NTDLR is missing" and no winXP. I rebooted and was again back at the prompt typing the word GRUB hundreds of times. I then proceeded to fix my MBR with the win98 floppy, fdisk/mbr.

I have also just finished installing Mint 3.0 just to get it to install the GRUB menu on a floppy like before. It was working fine until i installed Mint 7... the GRUB floppy then no longer recognized any of the O/S's.

I'll give the CD version a try

m

Well... I went against the SuperGrub website's recommendation of not to use SG2D... I used it, I figured that I had nothing more to lose.

It worked flawlessly.. although not the nicest looking menu, but it worked. When I inserted the floppy version and rebooted, I didn't have to do anything. It found Mint's kernel and just proceeded to boot... and when I restarted and removed the floppy... winXP booted... PERFECT, just like I had Mint 3.0 before. I no longer have to fiddle with the MBR, and that's a great relief.

I would like to say though, I really wish that GRUB was not so complicated, it almost turned me off on giving Linux another whirl...

Thanks for pointing me to SuperGrub Jay, very much appreciated.

M

Good to see you got it working, You are correct that the grub has a lot of configs & can be very confusing.
But the super grub disk is the only one I have tried & it has solved some issues on my hardware.

Please do not forget to add ( SOLVED ) to your post header or people may continue to respond, thinking that you still have an issue.

Happy Minting,
Jay514