Further information: Boot-Repair diagnosis is http://paste.ubuntu.com/1121871/ && /1124095?

I am not familiar with all the things you have as options for your auto grub repair.

That said why are you in your options calling for sda3? You need to have the boot loading aimed at sda1 to boot.\

Have never really been fond of /boot partitions.

Just installed LMDE on my external so that I can loan it to someone with a bad drive until we get new drive. The bios on that box wants a separate /boot partition to boot from for some reason. Wouldn't do it.

Plugged it back in here and chrooted to it to run some grub commands on. Ended up needing to put some files in the /boot/grub directory that is still in the / partition. It is not complete but needs to be correct and have files that it appears to have to have in it.

Unless you are going with full encryption or some other reason to NEED a /boot partition I would stick with just booting from the / partition.

Of coarse just wanting a /boot would, for me, be needing one. I would have chroot in and see what errors you are getting from grub commands from "update-grub" checking the results with "grub-mkconfig" and pulling up the actual files for the 2 grub.cfg files that seem to be needed, one in your /boot partition and one in your / partition.

Edit hell out of the buggers. Read the things and make sure your text editor has line numbers so you can check the errors.

Mine turned out to need the "video.lst" and the background image file in the grub.cfg on my / partition.

This was, remember, LMDE not Debian straight up (based on Debian testing and compatible with the Debian testing repos). Have never installed Debian with a separate /boot. I have several installs of Debian and use testing as my production OS. I boot from my / partition.

Booting from the / partition you definitely are calling on that partition. Booting from a /boot partition the only thing grub should be looking for is that /boot partition. The files there will want to check the / partition but it knows where to look.

You may, speaking of that, want to check your "device.map" in your /boot partition and make sure it is correct.

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A dead drive (as /dev/sdb) was discovered and removed which solved the booting problem. My thanks for the assitance.