Boot Mint with WinXP Bootloader

[merlwiz79]

What is the problem with grub?
Does it boot Mint?
Does it boot XP?

[newW2]

Not much in the way of a description of what is happening. So here is something that can happen and is easy to check and correct:

You may be encountering a UUID miss-match problem. Grub won't do much for you when it happens. What to do to find out and fix it, if that's the problem.

Do the following in terminal:
Enter code:
sudo vol_id /dev/sdxy -u
Where x=a if the primary drive in a multi-drive rig, and y=the partition number of the drive (it's the location of the offending partition - I assume that is the partition you installed Mint on).
Note: If you are using IDE drives then the you would use: sudo vol_id/dev/hdxy

The output of this command will display the UUID of the drive (sdxy or hdxy). It's a good idea to run the id command for all the disk numbers and have them handy because you need to compare them to the UUIDs listed in the fstab file. To list and change the UUIDs listed in the fstab file do the following in a terminal.

Enter the following command in terminal to display fstab in a text editor:

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Compare the UUIDs in the fstab file listing with the list of UUIDs you got from the vol_id command. If you find one in fstab that isn't the same UUID as the the one listed by the vol_id command, edit the fstab UUID to match the vol_id command.

Personally, I agree with a previous Mod from the board: "UUID's make matters unnecessarily complicated by being "unique" ..." See this post. It will give you the rationale for why device names are preferred over the UUID strings.

http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopi ... 2001#25955

I hope this gets you up and running.

[merlwiz79]

Did you install grub to the MBR?

[merlwiz79]

It does install to it to the MBR of sda, unless you use a /boot partition.
Did you change the hard drive order in the BIOS?
Or did you reinstall the XP MBR?
You could try WinGrub.
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p9.html