Blowing away Fedora but Mint won't boot

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voodoodoc2

Blowing away Fedora but Mint won't boot

Post by voodoodoc2 »

I have an existing system that has run Fedora (various verisons) for years. Decided to give Linux Mint a try and it all seemed to go swimmingly until it said installation was complete and I rebooted. After POST, I just see a white dash like it can't find anything to boot. Never see Grub or anything.

Disk configuratoin is as follows, just want to overwrite Fedora, but not touch /home or my backup drive so I set partitions up manually:

/dev/sda1 - mount point: boot, format
/dev/sda2 - mount point: /, format
/dev/sda3 - swap
/dev/sda4 - mount point:/home, do NOT format

/dev/sdb1 - backup for /home [told Mint to not use it]

It's also strange I never got prompted by the installation to enter a root password, it had me create what seems like a user account, so I'm wondering if I missed a step or it crashed without my knowing or something.

So on the live CD, I open a terminal and mount up /dev/sda1 and look in boot/grub but there is no grub.conf file present, can't imagine that's normal is it?

Code: Select all

mint grub # pwd
/mnt/temp/grub
mint grub # ls
fonts  gfxblacklist.txt  grub.cfg  grubenv  i386-pc  locale  setup_left_core_image_in_filesystem
If I mount up what is supposed to be / (/dev/sda2) it certainly looks like things got installed so I know it did something, Fedora is certianly gone.

Code: Select all

mint etc # cat /mnt/temp/etc/os-release 
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="12.10, Quantal Quetzal"
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu quantal (12.10)"
VERSION_ID="12.10"
mint etc # cat /mnt/temp/etc/lsb-release 
DISTRIB_ID=LinuxMint
DISTRIB_RELEASE=14
DISTRIB_CODENAME=nadia
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Linux Mint 14 Nadia"
mint etc # 
Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
voodoodoc2

Re: Blowing away Fedora but Mint won't boot

Post by voodoodoc2 »

Should also mention I see the following error after some time goes by, even with just the liveCD. Figure it's innocuous since I don't even have a floopy drive.

Code: Select all

Error mounting /dev/fd0 at /media/mint/disk: Command-line `mount -t "auto" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid" "/dev/fd0" "/media/mint/disk"' exited with non-zero exit status 32: mount: block device /dev/fd0 is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: /dev/fd0: can't read superblock
caf4926
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Re: Blowing away Fedora but Mint won't boot

Post by caf4926 »

Did you set grub to sda?
Like this: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10573557/Mint_ ... loader.png

Were you using a DVD or a USB as install media
Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon
voodoodoc2

Re: Blowing away Fedora but Mint won't boot

Post by voodoodoc2 »

I am using the live DVD. Actually now that I think about it I may have told Grub to use /sda1. Doh! So MBR is probably formatted and blank which is why nothing boots. I guess I could mount sda2 and chroot into it and re-install Grub, but I'll just give the installation another go so I can grab some screen shots in case it's something else.
voodoodoc2

Re: Blowing away Fedora but Mint won't boot

Post by voodoodoc2 »

After re-installing and putting grub on the MBR things seem to work. Despite my bonehead move the installation process was a breeze. Hats off to the Linux Mint folks.
caf4926
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Posts: 1916
Joined: Mon Mar 22, 2010 3:21 pm
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Re: Blowing away Fedora but Mint won't boot

Post by caf4926 »

voodoodoc2 wrote:After re-installing and putting grub on the MBR things seem to work. Despite my bonehead move the installation process was a breeze. Hats off to the Linux Mint folks.
Yep
Good to hear
Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon
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