Solved BOOT / Install problem on MINT

FSL

I've posted this in the MINT forum but also here in case anyone can help

I have an old computer with windows XP Pro and two hard drives. It won't boot from a USB (option not available in BIOS) I didn't have a CDR to hand and burning the latest iso to a CDRW didn't work it booted but got disc errors. So I created a bootable USB from the ISO put the hard drive into another machine which will boot from a USB. I then used GPARTED from an UBUNTU version on the newer machine to shrink the existing partition on the HDD from the old machine and create an ext4 partition and a swap partition. I then booted from the USB with only the HDD from the old machine active and installed MINT Helena. Everything seemed to go well. It rebooted, updated the system and happily boots.

Now comes the the problem. When I put the HDD back in the old machine it won't boot from it. Not even of it is the only drive attached. The boot just cycles. If both the HDD's are in it will boot windows.

Any suggestions.

Its an ABIT AT7 motherboard with and AMD XP 2200+ processor. Could it be the bios cannot read the ext4 partition. Should I try again using ext3 or even ext2?

Edit can't see the logic but reinstalled Mint still didn't work but with the Mint HDD on an ata slot on its own the cd and dvd on the secondary ata and the windows HDD on one of the additional ata's Mint boots fine. Now need to read up on how to amend grub2 to give the windows as an additional boot option.

Naikon

FSL wrote: »

I've posted this in the MINT forum but also here in case anyone can help

I have an old computer with windows XP Pro and two hard drives. It won't boot from a USB (option not available in BIOS) I didn't have a CDR to hand and burning the latest iso to a CDRW didn't work it booted but got disc errors. So I created a bootable USB from the ISO put the hard drive into another machine which will boot from a USB. I then used GPARTED from an UBUNTU version on the newer machine to shrink the existing partition on the HDD from the old machine and create an ext4 partition and a swap partition. I then booted from the USB with only the HDD from the old machine active and installed MINT Helena. Everything seemed to go well. It rebooted, updated the system and happily boots.

Now comes the the problem. When I put the HDD back in the old machine it won't boot from it. Not even of it is the only drive attached. The boot just cycles. If both the HDD's are in it will boot windows.

Any suggestions.

Its an ABIT AT7 motherboard with and AMD XP 2200+ processor. Could it be the bios cannot read the ext4 partition. Should I try again using ext3 or even ext2?

Check out the boot sequence in the BIOS configuration utility. Should be F2 or DEL depending on your motherboard. When the machine boots it performs a
POST test to probe any attached hardware. Does the Drive appear onscreen during boot? If so, the boot sequence is not right. You need to set the hard disk
(primary or seconday)as the first boot device.

It does not matter what type of file system is in use this early in the boot phase. The master boot record(first 512bytes usually)is read before the OS is loaded.
You should at least get a grub prompt regardless of the file system. Hopefully you will get it sorted out. It should not cause much hassle if the boot order is ok.

FSL

It doesn't make any difference. I have the boot sequence CDROM HDD1 HDD0 where HDD1 is seen and is the one with Mint on. It boots into Windows. If I set the boot sequence to CDROM HDD0 disabled and disconnect the Windows only HD it sees the Mint HD as HDD0 and just cycles around the boot.

The drive has three partitions a Windows type an ext4 and a swap. When both drives are connected and Windows boots both drives are seen by Windows albeit only the Windows partition on the drive Mint is on appears in my computer. as is normal for Windows.

Sherifu

Sounds like you may have to install grub onto HDD0