I'm trying to install the above distro on my old laptop (needs to be 13 xfce as laptop doesn't have pae). I have a few partitions on this laptop due to previous installs:

sda 1 - NTFS - contains the original Windows XP, which no longer works;

sda 5 - contains a working Linux Mint 12 lxde, which is my current install and I don't want to lose yet. It's vital I am still able to boot to this after my new install of 13 xfce;

sda 7 - a failed install of Mint 13 xfce, which stopped booting or working after I performed my first batch of updates. Dunno why, but it don't wanna boot anymore. It still shows up on the Grub list upon bootup, but doesn't work.

Upon trying to install my new 13 xfce from a DVD, it doesn't say "This computer currently has multiple operating systems on it, what would you like to do?", as I was expecting, and allow me to select "Install Linux Mint alongside them", but seems to automatically go to the "Something else" screen, and I don't know what to do next to avoid messing anything up on my system.

I have attached three screenshots:

(i) the Install Screen I'm talking about, which presents a graphic of how it sees my system.
(ii) a GParted screen dump of how my system appears when I'm live-booted from the DVD; and
(iii) another GParted screen dump of how it appears when I'm booted into my current Mint 12 lxde system. I notice that the DVD has nicked my root partition for Mint 12 lxde and has called it /cdrom.

I'm confused as to what to do when the Install Screen presents itself to me during install. sda7 contains the faulty previous install of 13 xfce, but I want the Grub bootloader to load onto sda1, including an entry for my current Mint 12 lxde and the new Mint 13 xfce.

Could someone please advise me on the action to take at this point in the install, without messing anything up? I don't need anything on sda1 or sda7; but I imagine the bootloader needs to go onto sda1 anyway.

I was hoping the installer would create a new partition from spare space on sda1 for this install (or install over the faulty version if I told it to).

Thank you for any help you can give.

Steve

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You and me both - that looks bloody odd. Is this a real physical DVD you booted from, or an iso on the hard-disk ?.
Boot the DVD, go here and do as it says, and post the RESULTS.txt here.

Before reinstalling to sda7, boot into sda5, open a terminal and run and see if that fixes the booting problems of sda7

For colorpurple21859's suggestion: I ran sudo update-grub when booted into Mint 12 lxde on sda5, but it made no difference. Oddly, the text the terminal outputs is:

No mention of the Mint 12 lxde on sda5! But it still appears on the Grub menu (because it has an entry in fstab) and boots normally.

I would point out that, prior to having the DVD burnt for Mint 13 xfce, I followed the instructions suggested on a different query I posted on LQ about this (see: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...2-a-4175524219), which basically entailed attempting to boot the iso using an amended Grub (without writing the iso to a DVD) and also using (I think) unetbootin to do the same kind of thing. Neither worked; but I wonder if this has altered the boot files to mess up the booting method for the DVD.

For information, the /boot directory of my sda5 working Linux 12 lxde looks like this now:

For syg00's suggestion, the RESULTS.txt file from the bootinfoscript is attached. Nothing seems amiss - the sda5 is still there with the correct content. (Please note I have edited a huge amount of identical errors from the very last bit of the text file, otherwise it exceeds the LQ attachment upload limit).

It just seems as thought the DVD installer is using sda5 as a mount point, and therefore the usual contents of sda5 on the HDD are not available.

I just don't want to do something during installation that's going to make Linux Mint 12 lxde unbootable, or erase it completely! I just want the installer to nick some of the space from sda1 partition and use it to install the new mint 13 xfce.

Do you think the previous attempts to install the iso direct from the HDD has messed up the boot config files, and the machine now thinks that the iso is on sda5 (where it actually was before - I've deleted it now), rather than the DVD?

The methods recommended to me in the previous LQ query said that because I was editing Grub.cfg directly, it wouldn't be permanent because the next update-grub would erase the changes. The unetbootin utility said the same; and I think that utility too changes the grub menu layout.

Thank you for any further suggestions you can give...

Attached Files

RESULTS edit.txt (22.0 KB, 29 views)

Well, yes there is. You ran it from Mint 12 so the entries below are Mint 12:

Doing the frugal install to your hard drive with unetbootin resulted in the 'extlinux' file being there as well as all the files beginning with 'ubn...' which are not needed. They are very small and I wouldn't worry about it now particularly since your system boots.

If you look at the bootinfoscript output at the very top, it states specifically that Grub2 is installed to the MBR and looks on sda7 for core.img and your boot files. So that should mean the boot menu you see is from the Mint on sda7 which does have correct entries for sda7 and sda5. The grub.cfg file on sda5 also has correct entries for sda5 and sda7.

Your second gparted image in the initial post is a little odd showing sda5 mount in the root of the filesystem at /cdrom.

If you are unable to boot Mint on sda7 but can boot Mint on sda5, I would follow the suggeston above by colorpurple2159.

Thank you for the clarification on the update-grub output, Yancek. However, I cannot help wondering if something in the files is confusing the DVD installer. Why has it mounted /cdrom onto sda5, for example? Why doesn't it have its own mount point?

If I cannot find a solution, I may consider backing up my whole /home directory to a memory stick (I just checked, it's about 20GB worth so not too much) and using Gparted on a Knoppix Live distro I have, to completely format the drive, and install Mint 13 xfce from scratch. Presumably, if I then load my /home backup files on to my new /home directory (overwriting as necessary), that will give me back not just my files but my preferences, Firefox bookmarks etc.

Is this do-able? Or is this likely to cause more difficulties than it solves?

Your bootinfoscript shows you have Mint Maya installed on sda7. It also shows that the Grub2 bootloader is installed to the master boot record and points to sda7 for its boot menu. You have entries for it in its grub.cfg for Mate as well as Mint LXDE. When you boot, is the first entry you see just Linux Mint or does it show Linux Mint LXDE. That's the way they are labelled in the grub.cfg file on sda7 and the first item on the grub menu should just just show Linux Mint. That would be sda7, Mint Maya. The menuentries from the Mint LXDE are the opposite with Mint LXDE being the first entry.

I don't know what the problem is with sda5 at /cdrom.

What happens when you try to boot Mint on sda7? Since you can boot the Mint on sda5 and want to keep it, I would suggest you boot it and install Grub to the mbr pointing to sda5 with this command: sudo grub-install /dev/sda
That should put the Mint on sda5 in charge of the bootloader. After doing that, follow the advice above by running:

See if you get an entry for Mint on sda7 by watching the output. If you do, try booting it.
Also, you do not want to install Grub on sda1, the windows partition. Even though it doesn't boot, it is an ntfs filesystem and there is no point in putting it there. With a standard BIOS/MBR, you either put Grub in the master boot record or you put it on the system partition.

If you don't want the Mint currently on sda7, when you boot the installation medium and select Something Else, you will get to the Installation screen and here you would select sda7 to install and click the Change tab below the window and set the filesystem type, check the Format box and for mount point select /, which is the symbol for the root of the filesystem.

That is true. If you want the menuentry for the iso to be temporary, edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg. If you want the menuntry to be permanent, edit /etc/grub.d/40_custom - then do sudo update-grub

Question: do you want to preserve the non-functional Windows on sda1? If not, why not just install Mint 13 there?
As yancek advised, install grub to /dev/sda during installation, and, in this case, chose sda1 as your / partition.

Hmm. I think I see what might have happened. The latest Linux to be installed was on sda7 - a version of Mint 13 that didn't want to boot after it was installed, so I cannot boot into it again. However, I presume this now "has charge" of the bootloader, so I can do "sudo update-grub" on sda5 all I want, and I presume this will have no effect?

Right. I'll give that a go next time I've got the laptop booted up.

That would be ideal - I just didn't know which box to tick on the installer (see screenshot in original posting) to get it to do that AND ensure that sda5 is still bootable once it's finished.

Before I carry out the suggestion above, could someone please take another look at that installer screenshot, and tell me whether I would accomplish my aims (regardless of where the bootloader is pointing to) if I clicked the "Format?" checkbox next to sda1 on the list and then clicked "Install Now" - or is it not as simple as that? And why does it still think the installation medium is on sda5 - unless this is a hangover from the (failed) attempt to install a version of 13 xfce from an iso located here (now deleted)?

Hmmmm.
So, at a minimum, the grub2 scripts have been amended by the grml-rescueboot install. Even though there is no grml directory showing in /boot for /dev/sda5. Delete any and all .iso files on that partition, and boot the DVD again, see if that works around the issue.
Probably means a forced re-install of the grub package is required, but let's see how that goes first.

Installing Mint 13 to sda1 to replace Windows would certainly be the easiest solution, and the best strategy. (Why leave all that unused space?)
Please note that you will be formatting sda1, and any files you have there that you want to keep must be backed up to a different location!!!
The installation of grub during the Mint installation will detect any other operating system you have, and put it on the grub menu. You don't have to worry about the grub configuration of the sda5 Mint. It will become irrelevant. That Mint will be on your new grub menu.
Yes, it is as simple as that. You chose the "Something Else" option in the installer, then double-click on sda1. That will give you the pop-up window where you Format As: ext4 and Mount As: / Then you are good to go. The installer will place the bootloader in the MBR of sda by default, and detect any existing swap partition automatically. You don't have to worry about those two things.

I tried what you suggested, TxLonghorn, but when Mint starts installation, the first thing it says is that it needs to write changes to the Partition Table and it can't do this because one of the partitions is still mounted (/cdrom) and it needs to unmount it to continue. I click "Okay" but then it of course unmounts the DVD and can go no further with the installation because it's just unmounted its own install medium!

I'm gradually running out of options here, short of backing up my /home directory from sda5, and using Knoppix Live to format the entire drive to ext4 and start again.

Can you think of any way I can proceed with this install, short of doing that?

The only thing you have to worry about regarding mounted partitions is to make sure that you have not mounted the partition you are installing Mint to - that would be sda1, if you are replacing Windows.
When you get the pop-up asking if you want to unmount the mounted partition, click "NO" and proceed.

Hmm... still not working. In fact, now I can't even get as far as I did before! If you would take another look at the screenshot of the Partitioning Tool, attached to my original post above:

I select "sda1" and double-click on it. Up comes the little window I presume you referred to before, and I select "ext4" as the format type, click on "Format" and select "/" as the mount point. But upon "continuing", I get an error that the partitioning utility has failed.

A web page on the Advanced Partitioning Tool seems to say I should be selecting "/boot" as the mount point, since I'm choosing sda1 as the root partition. However, the example on this page is actually manually partitioning a drive and creating swap partitions etc from scratch, so I am not sure if that's relevant.

Should I give that a go, or will that mess things up and make my computer unbootable?

AND I am leaving the "Device for boot loader installation" menu as "/dev/sda". Is that right, or should I be choosing "sda1" from the drop-down list?

Thank you for your assistance.

This sounds like exactly the correct procedure. I have installed Mint 13 to partitions of 11GB, so the size of your sda1 should be OK. The Mint installer (named ubiquity) is configured to refuse to install to partitions smaller than 10GB. I don't think that restriction is coming into play here - at least, I hope not.
On the other hand, when you say you get an "error that the partitioning utility has failed" you could be referring to the little popup that you get sometimes related to changing the partition size. The more I think about it, the more I believe that is the case. The warning says something like, "Warning, you are changing the partition size, do you want to continue?"
IGNORE THAT WARNING, but do not click the Continue button, click the BACK button, then continue with the installation. I will not go into the technical details of why that Warning pops up, (it has to do with new parameters for partitioning), but it is inconsequential. I ALWAYS click the Back button, and then proceed with the installation. You are right to ask about it, tho...
I guess I should confess that the only reason I click the Back button instead of letting the partitioning tool resize the partition is because it takes more time to let it do that, and I don't have the patience for it. When I see that popup, I think "Screw that, just install the f** thing." So maybe that is my own personality flaw coloring my advice...
You are correct - it is not relevant. Your installation has no need for a /boot partition in addition to the / partition.
sda is correct - not sda1.