How can I get back to Windows XP??

[hoe]

First, l would boot up with the Mint Live CD and install again and see if that works.

Wayne

[Aging Technogeek]

Check this article in the Mint Wiki:

http://linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php/If_ ... annot_boot

With one pata and one sata (or one internal and one external) hard drive it sounds like this is exactly what you are looking for.

[Aging Technogeek]

In terminal type

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gksu gedit /boot/grub/device.map

and enter your password when prompted

This will open the folder and allow you to make the needed changes. Just remember to save the changed file before closing.

[newW2]

I seen this so many times .... when I mis-spelled something. And I would swear that I hadn't done something like divice ...
You can verify that the file device map isn't blank by opening the file browser File System --> boot --> grub then right click on the file device.map and select open with "Text Editor"

And I no (Know) i didint miss spell anythunng fir shurr.

[Aging Technogeek]

You should see something there if it was set up properly when the installer installed grub, but it may not be much. I'm dual booting Mint 7 Main Edition and Mint 7 64 bit. My device map looks like this:

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(hd0)	/dev/sda

.

This is the identifier for the single hard drive in this computer. On my laptop (6 way booting Mint 7 main & 64 and Mint 6 main, XFCE, KDE, and Fluxbox) with 2 hard drives, my device map says

hd(0) dev/sda
hd(1) dev/sdb

Identifying the two hard drives.

This is the information that may be incorrect on your system, causing the Bios to look in the wrong place for the grub bootloader stage 1. If the file is empty, it would surely cause problems. As newW2 suggests, navigate to the folder in Nautilus (Computer=>File System=>Boot=>Grub=>device.map) and open it with Text Editor to verify its status.

[newW2]

Oh this is interesting. Grub isn't where you expect to find it. You can find out where and repair it as described here:
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... _your_grub
However grub not being located where you expect it appears to be a symptom of the different disk types.
What is the output of running this command in the terminal?

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sudo fdisk -l

[newW2]

Ok. I'd expect our device map to be:
(hd0) /dev/sda
(hd1) /dev/sdb
However, your grub isn't where we expected it to be.

[newW2]

here''s another thing you can do, so we can take a look at the menu.lst and device.map files.
Open your browser and enter the path to to those files (one at a time of course) as if it were a url. For example:
/boot/grub/menu.lst
Post the results here.
/boot/grub/device.map
Post the results here.

[Fred]

new2linux,

oops, didn't realize you were using the live cd. The partition Linux is on has to be mounted. The command to put into the browser would then be /media/whatever_the_mount_point_is/boot/grub/menu.lst

Fred

[newW2]

So if you aren't able to boot still now do as indicated in the Aging Technogeek post and do the following.

Find out your different UUIDs run the following in a terminal

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sudo blkid

You will get soming like this as output

/dev/sdb1: UUID="5365349a-733f-42c7-9ff3-5d8897b2aa1e" TYPE="ext4"

Copy the UUID (without the quotes) to the line in your menu.lst file that starts with kernel
Actually yuou will replace the /dev/sdb1 with the UUID
Like this. Here's your Gloria entry in the menu.lst file. You need to edit as I show in the NOW: changes with what you got for UUID from the command: sudo blkid output for /dev/sdb1

## ## End Default Options ##
WAS:
title Linux Mint 7 Gloria, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=/dev/sdb1 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet

NOW:
title Linux Mint 7 Gloria, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=5365349a-733f-42c7-9ff3-5d8897b2aa1e ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet

WAS:
title Linux Mint 7 Gloria, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=/dev/sdb1 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic

NOW:
title Linux Mint 7 Gloria, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=5365349a-733f-42c7-9ff3-5d8897b2aa1e ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic

[newW2]

You must edit the file as root. in the terminal enter:

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sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

You will be asked for your password. Make the edits and save.
Note: you can also drag the file from the file browser to the terminal where you entered sudo gedit