Failed GRUB installation, please help!!!!!!

Questions about Grub, UEFI,the liveCD and the installer
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Husse

Re: Failed GRUB installation, please help!!!!!!

Post by Husse »

94% and no grub - that seems to me to be a known bug in Ubiquity - the installer - but it only happens with far more partitions than you have
Do you still have the live CD for Mint 5?
If so use that to install Elyssa again - seems you have your data safe (well as safe as they can be on FAT32)
Then wait for a later version of Mint than Felicia - after all Elyssa (main) is a LTS edition
Oh - can you boot Windows?
Start the live CD, press any key when it counts down and select "Boot from local disk"
If you have a "real" Windows CD, not a recovery CD, you can repair MBR from it
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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altair4
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Re: Failed GRUB installation, please help!!!!!!

Post by altair4 »

Just as a followup to what Husse said above:

If you're very lucky you have a WinXP Install Disk ( not the recovery disk ). You can go into recovery mode and repair the WinXP bootloader:

1. Insert the Windows XP CD into your CD drive and restart your computer.
2. When the text-based part of Setup begins, follow the prompts. Select the repair or recover option by pressing R.
3. Issue the following command at the prompt: fixmbr

If you're not so lucky you can do the following:

Go to http://www.allbootdisks.com/download/iso.html

Download the Win95b.bootdisk.iso
( Don't worry about it being Win95 and not WinXP - We'll be using DOS commands anyway )
Burn it to a CD
Boot the machine with that CD
Issue the following command: fdisk /mbr

Both these methods will restore the MBR to the WinXP boot only state.
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Fred

Re: Failed GRUB installation, please help!!!!!!

Post by Fred »

idshm

You can also use SuperGrub live cd iso to repair/replace your Windows pointer in the mbr. This is a handy tool to have around anyway, as it will boot almost anything, Windows variants as well as Linux.

You should be able to use SuperGrub to boot into your Linux install where you can then manually install grub too.

Download and burn the latest stable version of the live cd iso.

http://download.linux-live-cd.org/Super ... sgd/cdrom/

Fred
altair4
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Re: Failed GRUB installation, please help!!!!!!

Post by altair4 »

Using the fixmbr method will completely replace whatever is in the MBR ( Master Boot Record ) with WinXPs bootloader so you wont be able to boot into linux. Linux will still be there ( in whatever state it's in after stalling the install ) it's just that windows knows nothing about linux.

I've never used SuperGrub but that sounds like a very promising tool. In fact it sounds like you may be able to do both methods. fixmbr so that you can reassure yourself that Windows is alive and well in there and then SuperGrub to see if Linux can be repaired. Fred is the expert on SuperGrub and it's capabilities.
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distoaddict

Re: Failed GRUB installation, please help!!!!!!

Post by distoaddict »

idsh wrote:Hello again,

I managed to boot up windows and now I am trying to use SuperGrub to restore Grup of Linux Mint. I am, however, not sure what option i should use. Do I use "Restore Grub in partition" or in hard disk?
in Hard Disk.
Husse

Re: Failed GRUB installation, please help!!!!!!

Post by Husse »

I think the install failed before it did anything to grub - I've had that happening a couple of times, but then I had another Linux so I could continue
Use the super grub disk to install grub
viking777

Re: Failed GRUB installation, please help!!!!!!

Post by viking777 »

I had this problem as well when I first installed Mint (although I have a lot more partitions than you and it was considered that was my problem). I was able to work round it because I have other versions of Linux installed with grub on their own partitions so I just used another grub instance then copied the Mint entry into that. Later on I switched over to using the Xfce CE edition and it installed perfectly first time despite the number of partitions. So my suggestion is why not try the Xfce ce version and see how you get on with it. It is miles better than Gnome anyway (apart from wicd!).
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