Strange booting problem XP and Mint

[drs305]

I think the general terminology is 'dual boot' whether or not the OS's are on the same drive or not. But that doesn't really matter.

I am not sure what is going on, but to continue investigating I can think of two things to try:

1. Switch the boot order in BIOS, even though it says it is booting to the drive you want. You can also check the SATA cables (or PATA). Perhaps they are reversed and that is why it appears to be booting the incorrect drive first.

2. If you have done that, next try holding down the SHIFT key during the boot process. If it is Grub2 that is controlling the boot (but selecting Windows) the menu will appear. We will then know that we have to work on the G2 files.

3. Finally, you can check to see if you have a /boot/grub/device.map file. It's just a text file so you can check it to make sure the drives aren't reversed. Most installs don't have a device.map file, so if it doesn't find one that is ok.

cat /boot/grub/device.map

[nixie21]

Drives are set up right. Holding shift does not do anything, it goes right to windows.

The cat of the file =


(hd0) /dev/disk/by-id/ata-Maxtor_6L200P0_L40CSASG
(hd1) /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3120026A_3JT3AE1L


As a test I went into bios and turned the slave drive to off and then it booted fine (I figured it would)

Thanks for the help!

[moon_raker]

As a test I went into bios and turned the slave drive to off and then it booted fine (I figured it would)

Thanks for the help!

So, you are getting the grub2 menu and can choose which OS to boot ?
Good news if that is the case.

[nixie21]

Well, it does go to grub right away when I have the slave drive set to off. I can access the drive inside linux...thing is that I can not boot to this drive at all now. Even though it shows up in grub, it is OFF in the bios so will not boot to it. This stinks!!!

I dont need windows too often so this is good enough I guess