My experience with Dual Booting Mint8 and Windows7

[Lits]

I I originally had Linux Mint 8 on my computer. But i wanted to dual boot with windows 7, so I shrunk the partition of my linux mint 8 to half and create a new ntfs partition for windows 7. I go through install and everythings fine and dandy. But after windows 7 installs and the computer reboots, I was unable to log into linux mint 8 at all because the grub menu disappeared!!!

I had the biggest trouble trying to get the grub boot menu back and I did not understand why. But after a couple hours of failed tries, I realize that all the tutorials I used to get the grub menu back was for grub 1 and not grub 2 which linux mint 8 has. So I started to look into grub2.

So what do you do if you can't even get into the linux OS to change the grub? Well the easiest thing to do is boot into a live installation CD. It will allow you to boot into the linux environment. Now you can try and fix grub from there! But how...? That was the question I struggled with for a little bit. But after a while I believe a found a easy way to fix the problem.

I came up with this series of command line to use so that you do not need to go and edit any grub files.

sudo fdisk –l (This will show you the different partitions. See which one is the linux distribution and copy that down.)
sudo mount “/dev/sda1” /mnt (change the /dev/sda1 to whatever the partition the linux distribution is on)
sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo chroot /mnt
grub-install /dev/sda
Ctrl+D
sudo umount /mnt/dev
sudo umount /mnt
sudo apt-get install --reinstall libdebian-installer4
sudo os-prober
sudo update-grub

Then reboot! I really hopes this works and saves someone else hours of time that I lost :/

[breaker]

Uh, yeah, that is a common response straight from the Ubuntu Grub2 wiki, we give this solution out a few times a week at least:

See here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2 ... 20GRUB%202

But thanks for putting it into the body of a message, I'm sure it's bound to help someone!

Glad you got it sorted!

[Lits]

Oh, haha I feel stupid now for wasting so much time when everything is right there. Haha thanks for the heads up, and for making me feel stupid

[JAHGoVeg]

hey just to tell you this helped me when i searched grub2 problems i got this article thanks for the effort