Reinstall Mint now have two icons for NTFS volume on desktop

[mschilling]

The last time I installed Mint I didn't see the two icons, only one showed on the desktop. Also now, when I boot, I get a screen prompting me to pick an os, Linux or XP, to boot from. I should have only one os on each drive, so there shouldn't be an option. Previously, with the first install, I picked the drive to boot from and the installed os was booted. Any idea what I did wrong with the second install? Somehow my system now sees the main hdd as a dual boot, I think, whereas I have a second hdd for Mint.

[Boo]

mint and ubuntu will find and list OS's on all the disks in your system.
so it is normal to have a choice between OS's to boot in grub, but by default it should boot mint.

I would need more information about your systems configuration and how you boot now compared to last time.

[mschilling]

It's a Dell D600 laptop with a second hdd in place of the optical drive. The bios can be set to boot from the different drives by using F12 at boot up. The first time I installed Mint I had the Mint hdd in the internal hdd bay and used the optical to boot from for the install. Then I moved the Mint hdd to the second hdd caddy and returned the XP drive to the internal spot.
The second time I installed Mint, I booted from an external USB optical drive and installed Mint over top the first install on the same hdd, but this time that hdd was in the second hdd caddy. Grub now sees a choice of two systems on the hdd. When I choose XP, the bios will start booting from the internal hdd, and when I choose Mint, it will boot from the second hdd. There is now no need to press F12 to choose a drive to boot from. Maybe this is the way the setup should work (?)

[Boo]

yes this is totally normal.
That is the way it is meant to boot.

what happened the second time is that mint could see the primary drive with windows on it so it added it to the grub boot menu.

what also happened is that mint wrote grub to the MBR (master boot record) of the primary disk (windows).
so now if you use F12 and choose the second disk (mint) it may not boot.
but since you installed to it the first time grub is also in its MBR and so may boot it anyway.

well if you mix up the hard drives now you may have booting problems so please ask questions if this happens.

[red-e-made]

I had this same thing happen to me when I did a re-install. I recommend booting from your LiveCD and manipulating your partitions using GParted. You may need to re-install afterwards.

[antiquexray]

The last time I installed Mint I didn't see the two icons, only one showed on the desktop. Also now, when I boot, I get a screen prompting me to pick an os, Linux or XP, to boot from. I should have only one os on each drive, so there shouldn't be an option. Previously, with the first install, I picked the drive to boot from and the installed os was booted. Any idea what I did wrong with the second install? Somehow my system now sees the main hdd as a dual boot, I think, whereas I have a second hdd for Mint.

I have the same...check out this link:

http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... ion&t=3594

After learning why they were being mounted, I was able to remove one of the icons. The problem is that it then wouldn't show my flash drive, cd, etc., when mounted.