BleepingComputer.com: Partition booting problem

I am using two partitions on my machine, Ubuntu on ( sda1 ) and Mint on ( sda6 ). It has always been that I could choose which partition to boot ( Mint was the default first boot ) but I seem to have created a problem for myself.

I was playing around with Gparted the other day trying to clear out some remnants, and decided to shrink my Mint partition, and after doing that my machine wouldn't boot - I think all I got was a grub prompt. So I popped in a live cd again to use Gparted, and deleted sda6 then installed Mint 11 there. Now, Mint boots fine but I don't get the screen during during boot-up where I can choose which partition I want to boot. I guess that would be the MBR? I mainly use Ubuntu but can't get to it now - it seems to be "in tact".

Anyhow, here's a screen shot of what I have right now - - - see anything wrong??????





Looks like that is a bit hard to view, here's a larger image.

This post has been edited by Keith1: 27 May 2011 - 01:44 PM

Do you have an option on any of your live CD's to redo MBR ?

Sounds simply that you dont have your Ubuntu partition in your GRUB's configuration. You will need to either edit your menu.lst (GRUB legacy), or the newer configuration files for GRUB 2.

Sorry about the delay, I didn't have a chance to work on this yesterday.

I didn't see any options on the live cds to redo MBR. I popped in my Super Grub disc and tried to fix MBR that way, but didn't get any farther that grub error messages. I don't know much about grub and MBR, so it looks like I need to do some reading and learn more about it.

Ok, here's what I finally did. I deleted the Mint 11 partition and installed Mint 10 from my "known good" live cd, And everything works normally now - I can choose the partition I wish to boot.

A couple of thoughts - Did I maybe get a "bad" Mint 11 download? I believe I did download it from Linux Freedom instead of the Mint site. I do see where there are a lot of issues with Mint 11 that might have had something to do with it. I do burn my .iso files to cd/dvd at slow speed.

One other thing that I did differently - when I installed 11 on sda6 I used the "install alongside" option. When I deleted 11 and installed 10, I used the manual installation option, could that have made a difference?

Where I'm at right now - - - - as I said, everything is working fine, so I'll leave it alone for now. I'll wait about a month to try Mint 11 again - should have a lot of the bugs ironed out by then, and I'll be sure and download it from the official Mint site.

Thank you very much for your input.

Keith

Keith, I believe that all went well, however update-grub either wasn't run, or it did not detect your Ubuntu partition. This does not sound to be an issue with your Mint copy. If you are at this situation again, run update-grub from a root terminal and it should find your second OS.

It completely slipped my mind to update-grub. I will surely keep this in mind for future occurences.
Thanks again,


Keith