Linux Mint Forums

I have been testing various Linux O.S. I finally settled on Mint 8 because it does a lot for me automatically. I did trawl through its inner workings, understanding some but not all the technical side of it.
It was installed on a 160 gb external usb drive. I had no problems booting it up and swopped between it and Vista which is installed on my laptop hard drive.
My problem is that on the last occasion i booted into Vista, i was informed via screen message that i should insert a boot floppy. I am guessing that the MBR was missing/corrupted due to the same problem during my earlier ventures into Linux. I know that that particular instance was my fault. I had to purchase a recovery disc so all was well.

I am puzzled as to how this could have happened when all i have done, to my knowledge, is install a few programmes and accept updates. All drives were shown, ext usb and vista drive, on drive info page. I dont think the Vista drive was mounted. Thats as far as i can go with info at the moment.

I would appreciate any help without getting too technical please, although i am aware thats not always possible.

davidl wrote:I had to purchase a recovery disc so all was well.

had to buy a vista recovery disk? you can download them for free: http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-v ... -download/

davidl wrote:I am puzzled as to how this could have happened when all i have done, to my knowledge, is install a few programmes and accept updates. All drives were shown, ext usb and vista drive, on drive info page. I dont think the Vista drive was mounted. Thats as far as i can go with info at the moment.

was grub2 updated as well? this may have been the cause if this if you let it execute the default scripts after its update.

Open the BIOS page on boot up and tell us the current order of the boot process please.

hdd..... usb..... dvd, etc .......... I manually choose usb for mint 8 and then when booting Vista let it choose from first in list

I have decided that i will go away and learn a lot more about linux and computers in general because i have a feeling i might very quickly be out of my depth when replying to some requests for information.
Thanks for replying so promptly ...................... now feeling slightly embarassed !