Get boot menu back for Mint 14

[valid]

Install Mint on comp that has win7. All went well for a few months. Win7 MBR got corrupt so I reinstalled it. Comp just boots into win7 now. How do I get the boot menu back so i can pick win7 or mint? Thanks

[saikee]

(1) You need to know the partition where Mint was installed. I used /dev/sda3 as an example but please adjust it for your case. If you are not sure ask question here!

(2) Boot up a Linux Mint Live CD & select a terminal.

(3) Obtain root privilege because you have to work with system-related commands by issuing this command

sudo su

For Live CD no password is asked.

(4) You create a mounting point to mount the Linux partition which I assume to be /dev/sda3, mount it and restore Grub in the MBR of first boot disk /dev/sda

mkdir /mnt/dude_said_mount_here
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/dude_said_mount_here
mount --bind /dev /mnt/dude_said_mount_here/dev
grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/dude_said_mount_here /dev/sda

If Grub does not report an error do a reboot and Grub menu will appear.

[valid]

Followed instructions and got this "grub-probe: error: failed to get canonical path of /cow" .

[saikee]

Can you post the output of

fdisk -l

to show your disks/partitions layout?

[valid]

device boot system

/dev/sda1 hidden ntfs winre THIS IS THE HIDDEN PARTION TO RESTORE WINDOWS
sda2 * hpfs/ntfs/exfat THIS IS SHOWN AS THE BOOT PARTITION
sad3 extended
sda4 linux
sda5 linux
sda6 linux swap / solaris
sda7 linux
sda8 linux swap / solaris
sda9 linux
sda10 linux

sda10 has the mint partition i need to boot from. i did not post the START, END, BLOCKS, and ID of the Fdisk -l (took me a min to figure the 1 should of been an l)

Thanks for your help.

[saikee]

It looks like you have installed more than one Linux in the system. Everyone is bootable unless it has been deliberately damaged.

It also appears that you have use multi partitions in the installation. The partition that boots is /boot and not any of the others unless you use a single partition to mount / in which /boot becomes its subdirectory.

Therefore I suggest you boot up the relevant /boot partition of your Mint in sda10. If you cannot remember which one then you can try the following two approaches:

(1) try the method in post #2 with sda10, then sda9, sda7, sda5 and sda4. One at at time.

(2) Run a Linux Live CD as (1) but mount each partition and see which one is /boot. /boot is the one that has a kernel named vmlinuz and initrd.img plus a subdirectory /boot/grub

Whenever a Linux Mint has been installed it will have its boot loader stored in /boot/grub. The grub-install command is to establish a link in the MBR to /boot/grub. There is nothing to it.

[valid]

Yeah, I have several partitions and OS's. When I loaded Linux was not sure what I was doing. Have a much better idea at this time. Did get the sda10 partition mounted and after rebooting does show the boot loader menu. Thanks for your help.