Installing on seperate HDs

[AK Dave]

You have XP on a SATA drive that your BIOS identifies as the master drive on the primary controller. XP boots normally. You installed Mint, but it won't "load"?

What do you mean by that?
1. You burned Mint to a CD, attempted to boot said CD, and it won't boot?
2. As above, but the CD boots. However, you fail to get to a Mint desktop or install screen? Perhaps a busybox error?
3. As above, but you get to the Mint LiveCD desktop; however, your attempt to install fails at some point? Perhaps it fails at partitioning?
4. As above, but you successfully installed Mint; however, it won't boot? Perhaps a busybox error? Perhaps a solid black screen?
5. You installed Mint normally, everything above actually worked, but once you Dual Boot to XP you cannot get back to Mint?
6. Something else entirely?

[Alpha-Geek]

What I suspect happened.... You installed Linux Mint to it's own hard drive & GRUB was also installed there as well. A lot of newer motherboards allow you to select the drive you want to boot from by hitting f8 or f12 during the initial POST. At that point you would select either your Windows drive or your Linux drive. The advantage to a setup like that is you don't have to worry about messing up your Windows MBR.

[AK Dave]

I successfully installed Mint on the afore mentioned HD. However when I boot, instead of giving me options which OS to boot, Windows just boots normally.

Only way I can imagine you pulled this stunt off is that you F'd with your BIOS in between reboots. You boot to Windows with one BIOS config. You renumber your drives to something else, install Mint, and then revert your drive numbering back to original.

If you don't have GRUB on the MBR of the primary drive, you won't boot anything but Windows. Theres your problem. Its #5.

The solution is rather simple. You need to do all of your booting without F'ing with your BIOS or drive numbering. Then and only then will Mint install properly AND write GRUB to the MBR of the correct drive. Mint put GRUB on the MBR of the wrong drive.

[AK Dave]

I don't understand why you didn't end up with grub on the first drive.

[Akanbe]

I have a similar problem as well

I have XP on an IDE disk and an extra harddrive on a SATA-link for multimedia. XP will not recognize my KDE install on my primary (IDE) drive. I can go into the live CD and see all the files are there, but under the XP system manager there is no choice to boot into Linux Mint (just XP).

Currently looking at the troubleshooting your live cd wiki as well as the "If your installed Mint cannot boot" wiki to see if I can find a fix.

for more clarification:

sda is my multimedia drive. it's the one connected to a sata link and therefore not my primary disk. Why this disk is SDA, i'm not sure.

sdb is where my xp and linux partitions are.

tried to use boot/grub/device.map but it wouldn't let me save the changes. don't know if this is the right way or not.