Txnca wrote:cebalrai wrote:I attached a snapshot of my hard drive as seen from Windows 7's disk management tool. I guess the 71 mb partition in front is the MBR? It doesn't have a drive letter - it just says "Healthy OEM partition".
Those two partitions in the back are Mint and Mint's swap. I just can't boot them.
I don't really care about keeping Windows' bootloader. I just want something to actually work.
First, the 71MB partition isn't the MBR. It isn't going to show in Disk Manager.
Honestly reinstalling Mint will overwrite the MBR with GRUB2 which will find and load Windows 7 and Mint.
I've got three OSes running on my desktop and they are all booting through GRUB2. Windows XP Pro, Vista x64 and Mint 8 x64. You don't have to follow my partition plan, that was just so when I install or reinstall different distros I don't have to reinstall GRUB2. I just have to update it when I have finished installing the new OS.
Again the easiest thing for you to do is reinstall Mint 8. Make sure it installs Grub to the MBR when you do. That will find Windows 7 and it should chainload it. You might have to make Windows 7 the active partition, or in Linux speak, make it the boot partition. Vista x64 has to be the active partition as well for it to load. It doesn't seem to matter to Linux one way or the other.
Steve
I did what you suggested and nothing worked.
I reinstalled Mint with the MBR to HD0. Grub 2 did not find Windows, so now I'm locked out of Windows again. I tried running startup recovery off the Windows disk, but is says there's no problem.
Then I tried your suggestion about burning the gparted ISO to disk and booting off of it. I got to the original menu, when when I selected gparted, it failed and gave me all kinds of errors such as:
Begin Mounting Root File System
hda: cdrom_decode_status: status=0x51 (Drive Ready Seek Complete Error)
hda: cdrom_decode_status: status=0x40 (Last Failed Sense=0x04)
possibly failed opcode
(then nothing happens)
I verified that the burn was good and I tried two CD drives.
The mint user guide says that Grub will find Windows and dual boot automatically for me.
Why isn't this happening?
I remain in dual boot hell. Anyone have any advice?
