GRUB Pointing The Wrong Way

[gardners7323guy]

I have a Dell Inspiron 14 n411z with 8GB memory, dual boot Win10/Mint 20.1. Added a Crucial 500GB SSD. Moved the HDD to the DVD slot, and put the SSD in the main slot where the hard drive was. Did not migrate properly, and copied the Boot and both OS to the SDD. Of course, it didn't boot right. Used Boot Repair on Mint Live CD to get it working. But I believe grub is still pointed at the HDD (sdb) for the the OS. I didn't realize that was happening until I deleted Win 10 off the HDD (sdb). Still have Win Recovery Partition on sdb. Now, everytime I try to go to both Grub entries for Windows, they both go to Win Recovery. I assume Mint is going to sdb also, because it does not boot any faster.

Layout below shows I alreaded deleted the first 3 partitions where the Windows stuff was on HDD (sdb).

My layout is
SSD
sda1 fat16 Boot
sda2 ntfs Win Recovery Part
sda3 ntfs Win 10
sda4 Extended Partition
sda5 fat32 Linux Boot or whatever that is before Mint
sda6 ext4 Linux Mint

HDD



sdb4 Extended Partition
sdb5 fat32 Linux Boot or whatever that is before Mint
sdb6 ext4 Linux Mint
sdb7 ntfs Shared Drive (used to move files between both OSs)

The link for the Paste Bin file that Boot Repair created is https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/jGqkbpsFQS/

I have been deep in Linux Mint for 5 weeks now. Been doing good on my own, but this problem has me stumped after migration (copy-I know) to SSD. I have no problems with dropping to terminal. I am using Mint as my daily driver, preaching the gospel of linux to everyone that will listen! I have enjoyed solving on my linux problems up to this point. As I told an employee yesterday, in 5 weeks I understand the layout of linux a lot more than Windows.

Also, if anyone knows how to get Aptik working on Mint, I need help. Every site I have been to shows the same install, but it is not grabbing it.
I want to add the new Mint 20.2 XFCE beta to the hard drive to test it out and would like to get my setup on there with little effort.

This is my first Lifeline to throw on my Linux change over.
Thanks for any help........

[zcot]

Hi gardners7323guy, Welcome.

A quick look at the boot-repair output mentions: "Please do not forget to make your BIOS boot on sda (ATA CT500MX500SSD1) disk!"

Also, sda6 and sdb6 have the same UUID. But that's not necessarily bad although if you are going to run both of them then you should change(and fix up) that situation.

It might be that the SSD doesn't have a boot flag.

I'm just passing by, I'll take a better look after a bit.

For the open source aptik, you download the .deb file from each link, not the most recent one though, use the previous 18.8 version.
https://github.com/teejee2008/aptik/releases
https://github.com/teejee2008/aptik-gtk/releases
-and double click it to install.

[gardners7323guy]

I'm just passing by, I'll take a better look after a bit.

Thanks for the ideas, zcot. That gives me a starting place to look on my end now. I know it is more than Grub Customizer can do, as I just tried that. One Win 10 entry showed HD0,MSDOS3 at the top of the code, and the other place in the code showed HD0,MSDOS2. I fixed that and installed to MBR and that didn't change the situation. So, I will look at those ideas you gave me. This problem has stopped me from working on a project for work that I am doing at home. Why else would I be trying to get back into that stupid OS. I can't wait to get this fixed, as I will be showing people what a multiboot machine looks like and why linux is so good. When people see a live CD just work with their hardware, and they are trying to get Windows to actually work on their system, they learn the power of the Linux Kernal!

When I complete the project for work, it is ending up on on Pi 4. lol

I appreciate your time.

[zcot]

After looking over the boot-repair log it looks fine, as far as it shouldn't be a problem to deal with.

I would unplug the HDD, boot into Mint, and run sudo update-grub. That should fix up the system as far as the Mint system goes.

-although that might fail to boot because there are numerous references to sdb(the HDD) in that listed grub info.

But, if you have to boot the live session usb again instead, and re-run the boot-repair again then it should not be a problem. It should fix up Mint easily when the HDD is not plugged in.


It looks like Win10 is possibly booting with an UEFI entry, but maybe not, either that or Mint was booting with an UEFI entry to get to a legacy bios/mbr boot. So you might have to deal with that situation, and it looks like you might not be able to do that with the Mint usb stick because it is not booting in UEFI mode(based on that boot-repair output) so you wouldn't be able to use the UEFI tools with it. Maybe you can boot the Mint stick in UEFI mode and in that case you could do the boot management and get the right entry for the Win10 setup. You can see a sampling of using the efibootmgr tool here: https://linuxmint-installation-guide.re ... boot-order and you would be able to check efibootmgr --help to see that there's a full set of management available. An easy thing is to disable an entry then check your setup. You can hone it down to the right thing, eventually just delete the bad entries. Use rename too to help with the management, for example the "Ubuntu" entries which are the UEFI related entries.


Ok, yea I wasn't going to mention the grub-customizer stuff because it was related to the HDD on the sdb device, but now that you've also put it on the SDD sda device I'll mention it. There's a lot of "up in arms" about it. Plenty of people hate on that tool, although to its credit that might only be because they aren't going to read the full docs about it and how it actually works and how to manage the files it adds. I don't know how it comes into play when boot-repair comes around, but at least from that initial report it looks like it won't cause any problems and it's able to see how the system boots anyway.

You can't leave the HDD there like it currently is(with the duplication stuff) without it causing issues. At the very least you need to fix up one of the Mint installs so the UUID's are different and that also means fixing /etc/fstab and the kernel init files on that drive accordingly.

As for Win10, get the HDD taken care of, either unplugged, or you have to remove the duplicate recovery partition from the HDD(sdb) and you can get it up from there, at the worst case you are using recovery to rewrite the bootloader. Doing that usually kills grub, and that's when you boot the Mint live session again and use boot-repair.

[gardners7323guy]

After looking over the boot-repair log it looks fine, as far as it shouldn't be a problem to deal with.

You can't leave the HDD there like it currently is(with the duplication stuff) without it causing issues. At the very least you need to fix up one of the Mint installs so the UUID's are different and that also means fixing /etc/fstab and the kernel init files on that drive accordingly.

I will start working on this tomorrow after work. I didn't think of unplugging the hard drive. I will tell you how it goes. Thanks...