Greetings -
I have read with interest Fred's initial post and the many that have followed. I've been running Linux Mint for about a month now on a Lenovo laptop (i5, 8 GB RAM) that started life running Windows 7/8. I bought the machine to experiment with Mint, though, and I'm not a Windows user as I find it to generally crap (indeed, it broke itself trying to apply updates to 8 and I haven't bothered with it since).
I purchased a new HDD for this machine, going from 500 GB to 750 GB and a 7200 RPM drive. This is a brand-new drive, not formatted and no OS, that I received today. For the past few hours, my friend (who has exactly the same machine and exactly the same new drive) have been struggling to get our custom installs of Linux Mint 14 Cinammon back up and running, with no luck.
The problem comes in the area of the bootloader, which seems to not be able to be installed no matter what we do. First off, here is our drive partition map:
/dev/sda1 200 MB ext2 /boot
/dev/sda2 2048 MB swap /swap
/dev/sda3 12288 MB ext 3 /
/dev/sda4 512000 MB ext 3 /home
/dev/sda5 10240 MB NTFS /shared
/dev/sda6 (remainder) NTFS /windows
We initially have set this up using GParted. There is no Windows install on here, but we created the two NTFS partitions in the event that we might someday put it back on.
When we run the install from the Live CD, all is well until the bootloader comes into play, at which time we are told that the install has failed on /dev/sda . We tried to overcome this by choosing /dev/sda1 (where we'd created this little boot partition), but that failed, too.
Most recently, I've tried running the Ubuntu Boot-Repair utility, which, from the looks of it, is telling me I have no GRUB installed anywhere on this machine. That would certainly cause a problem. But I had attempted to install Grub from the command line before running the utlity, although I guess that didn't work or save itself (as I'm booted off the CD).
This is about where my knowledge level encounters a brick wall. I'll include the results of the Boot-Repair utility here, for your persual; please click on this URL to learn more.
http://paste2.org/p/2619972
Any advice? We're going nuts here. Thanks.