Although I just did a fresh install of Linux Mint the other day, I decided to do it again to straighten some things out before I had customized everything. Mostly I chose to reinstall because I was having a difficult time installing VMware Server. Because it requires a manual install, when it didn’t work, I wasn’t able to go find all the traces it had left all over the system to uninstall. I’m going to try VirtualBox instead.This time around I had extreme difficulties with my mix of IDE and SATA drives working correctly with GRUB.
My setup is this:
- Primary IDE
- first partition: Windows XP
- second partition: /home
- third partition: Linux Mint
- Secondary IDE (linux swap)
- SATA 1 (data)
- SATA 2 (data)
- eSATA (data)
- USB IDE (data)
On the last screen of the install utility the “Advanced…” button gave the default for the bootloader installation as (hd0), which I thought would be acceptable. It wasn’t. GRUB would never start and the system would boot directly into Windows every time. I could boot into Linux with the Super Grub Disk, but that was not an ideal solution.
It turns out, the BIOS or the system or whatever sees the IDE drives first and the SATA drives second. Once any part of Linux Mint loads, its GRUB sees the SATA drives first and the IDE drives second. Therefore, (hd0) probably was /dev/sda during installation, which turned out to be the eSATA drive. I wanted the bootloader on the primary IDE drive.
I determined all of this with hours of going back and forth tweaking my /boot/grub/menu.lst file and trying to restore or install GRUB with Super Grub Disk. Using Super Grub Disk is how I found out the system sees the drives differently before Linux Mint starts. The GRUB command find /boot/grub/stage1 using SGD returned (hd0,2), while the same command from a terminal within the Linux Mint install or LiveCD returned (hd3,2).
I decided to redo the reinstall. This time I chose a different option from the “Advanced…” button on that last screen of the install utility. Instead of leaving it at (hd0) as is the default, I chose the drive from the list that I knew had the Windows partition on it. Although I thought it should be the first drive, it was listed as /dev/sdd. I deliberately chose the drive and not one of the partitions (/dev/sdd1, etc.).
The problems weren’t completely fixed there. The /boot/grub/menu.lst file had to be altered slightly. By changing references to (hd3,2) into (hd0,2) in the Linux section, GRUB would be able to boot into Linux properly.
The Windows section needed a little more tweaking. I found a few options on some forums. I removed all the map references and changed the Windows section to this:
title Microsoft Windows XP Professional
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
boot
After that change, everything booted like it was supposed to. I was amazed. GRUB loaded and I could choose Linux or Windows and each would come up with no problems at all. I was quite happy, finally.