Dual boot Windows and Mint 19 Tara issues

[earnestbunbury]

Hi. My experience so far with Mint 19 with a dual boot system...

I was excited to see Tara and downloaded it and burned it to a disk. Just so everything would be nice and fresh I reinstalled Windows 10, then used Mini-Partition to cut my hard drive in half and formatted the Linux half ext4. Then I stuck the Tara disk in and clicked on the option "Install Linux Mint alongside Windows 10".

The new Linux was pretty cool. The look is much nicer looking and slick. Every time I reload Linux Mint there's a bunch of things I do right away, like set the screensaver, colors, etc. One of those things was making the panel a bit larger- the default was sort of small. But right-clicking on the panel, or using the menu to adjust the panel gave no options. No problem, as I can live with that. I turned my computer off and on and everything seemed fine. Grub loaded and I clicked the Linux Mint option.

When it loaded everything was still fine. Except the icon in the lower right-hand corner said there were multiple updates. I downloaded these, just like I always do. That's when the trouble started. When I rebooted my computer and started Linux again the desktop looked really weird. There were icons missing in the lower right hand corner. I went to try to reboot, but the power button was gone. If this was a new feature I didn't like it. I right clicked on everything trying to find out if there was a new way to get to 'Restart, Hibernate, etc.' but there was nothing I could figure out. So I just held down the power button to restart. When it did restart I wasn't given an option, as the grub menu was stuck, saying that it "Didn't recognize, or couldn't find the device" There was a 'grub rescue' prompt, but I had no idea what to type in to fix it.

So I figured, hey, it's new and won't work on every system. I'll give it a month or two and then try and reload it again. Until then I'll use 'Serena'. So I loaded that and dual booted fine. It also asked me for updates. I picked them all except for the one with a '4', which was the new kernel update. I figured this was Tara. Now when I restart I get the same grub loading error. But I can't get back to Windows either. I put in my Windows 10 emergency startup disk in, so I could use Windows until I can figure out how to run Linux again (I HATE Windows). But the option for using the system image I had of Windows said it now can't be done. Now, no copies of Windows or Linux Mint will load. I am using my laptop right now to write this.

I'm still working on it but just wanted to throw my two cents worth in. I don't like Tara yet. I can't complain too much, as Linux Mint is free. Maybe I'm just an outlier and I'm the only one with these issues. Big pain though.

[simonsaysthis]

I am pretty sure you won't have a problem once you install Mint correctly. This all sounds like a botched install, especially since W10 keeps changing constantly so you wouldn't want to install alongside but rather manually create Linux partitions or - better- use a separate disk.

Hard to say what the real problem is since you didn't give any details on your system, nor your hard disk layout.

[earnestbunbury]

You're right. I installed it again and this version of Mint is the best I've seen yet. I hope it's a Windows killer. I must have messed something up when installing. I tried to delete this post altogether, but can't figure out how. Hope people that read this post also read this correction. I would pay for this version of Mint. In a sense I have since I donate, but will donate again. I now only use Windows for one thing- video editing. I hope Linux Mint puts them out of business.