Is sda17 acceptable to Mint and/or Grub?

[PussyCat]

As background to the subject question -

Mint is my favourite linux flavour (original title was to be Fresh Mint bites back...!) but I'm stuck at Mint 8 Helena!

I saw nothing in 9 and 10 to persuade me to upgrade - especially given my experiences of Mints' excrutiating installation procedure - which I've posted about several times before because of the lengthy probing and, most dangerous of all, what happens at the Grub phase. Mint 13 Maya problems were the subject of an earlier post.

Now for Mint 14 cinnamon edition...

OK, I made an initial mistake of selecting "install alongside.." instead of "custom" but the outcome should have been the same. The initial scan had determined that I had a bit (6.9Gb) of unused space (that I didn't know was there!) at the end of the drive and thought that a bonus since the original plan had been to utilise another partition.

Everything seems to proceed fine - if slowly - until the Grub phase. I was not prompted to choose where to put Grub, it just came up with an error. My practice (given the choice!) is to put Grub in the partition and use EasyBCD to access my chosen o/s.

However, to my horror (a non- functioning) Grub had been placed in the mbr with just a grub> prompt. Oh no! Mint has done it to me again. Next 24h spent trying to restore mbr, reinstall winXP (unnecessarily as it turned out) and then restoring BCD from within XP - and without access to Vista or anything else at that time.

This should not have occurred.

Anyway, all other issues notwithstanding - are partitions above 15 (old scsii limitation) acceptable to Mint/Grub? They are certainly visible and accessible to Mint through the file manager and disc management utilities.

[PS mbr restored from Mint Liveusb by installing and running ms-sys!]

[AlbertP]

If you install alongside another OS then Grub is put in the root of the disk, and you are not prompted for the location. And Grub does not use /dev/sdXY names anyway, so is not bound to any Linux limit to the number of partitions on a SCSI disk. Apparently this limit in Linux was lifted anyway, if the partitions are accessible.

[PussyCat]

Then that is very naughty and unacceptable.

I shall abandon ever trying to install Mint again.

[AlbertP]

Well for many users it is easier. Many people who try Mint don't know about bootloaders and partitions.

If you want to set them up yourself, use the "something else" option instead of installing alongside something.

[PussyCat]

As I said in OP "Alongside.." was selected in error and did not carry a health warning!

Are you saying that if I had selected "Something else" I would be offered a choice for Grub?

[AlbertP]

Yes, that will offer you a choice for the bootloader and will allow you to mount the partitions that you want.

[PussyCat]

OK - I'll give it another whirl (whilst I remember the strategies to fairly easily recover my system)!

EDIT:
Well - failed again...

Installation went smoothly with no reported errors but Grub replaces mbr again. Expected to make choice at end of process (as with most installers) but presumably should have set it somewhere in the same dialogue as selecting partition?

At least a proper Grub allowing me to select o/s so selected Mint and - error about trying to access "outside hd0". So I assume there would be the same problem even if Grub was in the right place (sda17).

Phew! Recovered mbr in 5min (it would have been 2min but had to download and make ms-sys again) and bcd had not been trashed this time!