After grub boot-repair can't boot, only terminal grub>

[treebull]

Heads-up: I've used linux for years but really don't know much about the inner workings, and am now far out of my depth! In short, I have a dual boot laptop with Mint 20.1, Win10 and a data partition. After a large (Mint) firmware update, the normal grub menu stopped working and it booted straight into Windows. No problem, normally, just use "advanced startup" or a live USB and use the boot-repair tool. I did, and since then I can't boot anything, not even a chance to go into BIOS, seconds after pressing the button (no spalsh screen) there's a black terminal screen with grub>

I found some old posts in various forums that suggest doing the commands below, replacing (hd0,1) with whatever partition has linux. I tried, there seem to be 8 partitions, all "gptX" (Mint is on gpt8) and a lot more versions of vmlinux and initrd.
I tried the command using the most recent versions, and then it goes to

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no root device specified.....

and then

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Busybox v1.30.1...

and a prompt

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(initramfs)

I'm completely lost! How can I make it boot? into any OS? I don't mind reinstalling the Linux partition, and even all the data is backed up, I just want my laptop back!

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set pager=1
ls
set root=(hd0,1)
linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.13.0-29-generic root=/dev/sda1
initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.13.0-29-generic
boot

[bendipa]

The last set of commands are basically what you need, except we don't yet know what partition your root is on. If it's not sda1 then those commands need to be adjusted. So from your grub prompt, type ls (hd0,1)/. Does the output show some of the top level linux root folders, ie boot, dev, home, etc, var, usr ?

[Larry78723]

Or they can boot from the install media (dvd/usb), open a terminal, and run the following command:

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lsblk -fi

and post the results.