WARNING! Long post!

I'm trying to dual boot windows 7 and mint using two drives. Been doing this for years with no problem that I couldn't work around until now. My windows got a virus and then my problems started...

I reinstalled windows to sda, no problem. I loaded my mint dvd and installed mint on sdb (60gb root, 200gb /home, 8gb /swap with the rest of the drive /ntfs for data. Installed grub to the mbr on sda.

After installing mint, I rebooted. Grub came up and I selected Mint and it booted fine. Rebooted to check that grub would boot windows, worked fine.

Then i tried to reboot into Mint again and got a grub rescue prompt. Lost windows boot and mint. I loaded up the live mint dvd and used gparted to look at my drives.

The two ext4 linux partitions were not recognized by gparted (or mount or fdisk or...), something had messed them up. I had to use a windows recovery disk to rewrite the mbr in order to boot back into windows.

I've tried installing several times since then with the same results. Sometimes I can boot maybe 2 times before it happens again.

Since this happened some things I've tried.

1. Used gparted to format the linux partitions before installing mint. Same problem.

2. Thinking my linux drive might be going bad, I tried the install with two other hard drives. Same problem.

3. I've tried boot-repair. Same problem.

4. I've tried Super Grub Disk, same problem.

5. I've tried to use easyBCD to use the windows boot loader, same problem.

6. Installed grub to sdb, same problem.

7. Installed grub to sdb1 with easyBCD, same problem.

8, Tried using a ubuntu dvd in case my mint dvd was bad. Yep, same thing.

So, I'm about ready to give up.

Acer AspireM 3900 with 8gb RAM
1tb windows disk, 2tb linux disk

Anyone got any idea on what else I could try? I'd really rather not use Virtualbox for my linux habit.

Thanks for any ideas.

Doyle

I assume you tried update-grub if you tried the GRUB rescue CD. You seem to have approached this most thoroughly.

Have you tried installing GRUB to the MBR? That's usually where I put it and it has worked smoothly. Just to be on the safe side, you might look at formatting the MBR first.

You might also boot to a Live CD of something and point smartmon tools at the HDD. Perhaps it's ill.

I did try updating grub, sorry I failed to mention that.

I actually tried installing to the MBR on both sda and sdb. When trying easyBCD I even tried sdb1. I didn't think about formatting the MBR but did format the drive partitions.

I actually did this for the linux drive, sorry I forgot to mention this. I did try 2 other hard drives too.

Thanks Frank, I appreciate the help.

Sounds like a virus. Might even be one you paid for.

Some years back I had a Dell that shipped with a "handy" security utility they neglected to mention. It installed itself in sector 2 (third sector) on the boot disk so it could check boots. Every Windows boot it would check if it was installed, and if not, did so. Classic virus actions - which of course kept overlaying grub. Took me ages to find and get rid of it.
Another "product key validation" tool, which I can't remember the name of, was reported to do similar.

Doesn't explain why your second disk is getting trashed, but sounds similar enough to have me thinking "bloody Windoze mindset".

1 members found this post helpful.

Parts of malware often live outside partitions. When trying to eliminate a "virus", complete wiping is called for, not just portions, such as partitions or MBR. The MBR is just one sector. There is a big bunch of sectors immediately following the MBR that malware likes to hijack.

1 members found this post helpful.

Try running boot repair with the Create BootInfo Summary option selected. When it finishes, it will give you a link which you can post here and members will be able to view the output and possibly make suggestions on a possible fix.

1 members found this post helpful.

syg00 wrote:

I'm beginning to think the same thing.

mrmazda wrote:

I didn't know this, sounds like I may need to do a low level format of the drives to see if that will clean them and reload everything.

Here is the BootInfo:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/p/ZQzy2mWZCY/

Note that My CDROM is my phone, sorry about that. MULTIBOOT is a usb stick with rescatux-0.51b3 loaded. Yet another try at fixing this problem.

Thanks,

Doyle

Boot repair shown unknown filesystem type for your Linux partitions on sdb. Not sure why but you might try running fsck on each partition. Generally, the boot repair will show at least the boot files on the Linux partition and they do not show at all, specifically the grub.cfg should be there with all the menuentries. You could try to manually mount sdb1/sdb2 to see if you actually have Grub files there.

This is what gparted shows also, unknown filesystem. Seems whatever this is trashes the whole partitions not just the grub entries. I'll try fsck and mount. I think I have already tried mount...

Thanks, I appreciate the help.

All,

I got to thinking about what syg00 and mrmazda said about this could possibly be a virus and decided to wipe the disk as mrmazda suggested. I wrote zero's to the drive using dd overnight and reinstalled Mint this morning. It worked!

I hope this will help someone else who is having the same problem.

That could well have been FlexNet, as used by some Adobe products.

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1661254