I need help with a dual boot windows 7 and linux mint 17.1 install. I came home today and I had to forceable shutdown my desktop because it was stalled with a blinking cursor. I suspect that was caused by either going into or out of suspend from last night. After that I was greeted to a an error attempting to read outside of hd0 and a prompt for grub rescue. I ended up throwing in the live cd and running boot repair using the following cmds:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repairsudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair

well it ended with some sort of error and here is the link to the output:

http://paste2.org/jgdyY2nk

Is there anything in the output that might indicate what's wrong or should I go ahead and try a reinstall of mint 17.1?

Someone suggested "can be fixed easily using the Live DVD and applying gparted's 'Check Partition' function" over here...
Have you tried that?

Does "Windows" boot? What version of Windows on your mint 17.1 (is that MATE or Cinnamon?).

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks, I did not come across that recommendation. Almost everything I found suggested boot-repair. I'll try it tonight and post my results. It looks like I have to start gparted and then right click on the partition and then select the "check" option.

Windows 7 also does not boot and I'm running Cinnamon this time around. I've had issues with the suspend functionality before and I'm kicking myself for not turning it off yet. A few times while restarting from suspend my monitor would remain blank and I would have to do a hard shutdown.

Should I go ahead and check every partition while I'm at it?

Linux filesystems gets checked at mount if needed. Just do /dev/sda2.

The concern I have is that grub-install (from /dev/sda2) worked, but update-grub didn't. Looks like it returned rubbish that the script (awk) couldn't handle.
fsck (which gparted will use) may fix things for you - or you may have to re-install anyway.

From the liveCD check the SMART status of that drive. If that's a Mint liveCD, use "disks" (just type it in the text box when you select the menu button). Even if it shows the disk is ok, click the "gear" icon top right and run the test.

1 members found this post helpful.

Be sure you know what is what. If unsure then make a backup now using a live cd/dvd or usb.

I did /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda2 last night. sda1 took under 10 min but sda2 ran for over 1 1/2 hrs. Attempted booting into linux but it never finished. Just hung on a black screen for 1+ hrs. Not sure if it makes sense to attempt another check partition on sda2.

I'm using a dropbox like service for my more important files but when I checked my other computer, it seems that nothing has been backed up for the last couple of weeks. I know why but that's another issue. Regardless, I need to backup those files. If this was windows I would just throw the harddrive into an enclosure and copy them to another computer and not worry about permissions. If I switch to root and copy those files, do I have to update those file permissions for the new user I create during install? Is there a proper way of using root to copy those files?

Thanks very much for the help. I usually make do by myself but I'm still a novice with linux and I really don't want to do something blatantly stupid and lose my files. Maybe after I sort this out you guys/gals can help me set up some sort of automated process to copy my most important directories to another hard drive or my nas or both. My home files are on a different partition than my linux install so maybe I can split that partition in half when I reinstall and use the new partition as backup storage.

I just did the SMART short self test on sda and the overall assessment was SELF-TEST FAILED

Strange - all the attributes indicate an assessment of OK. Should I assume the drive is failing and that I should backup my files while the drive is still accessable and chuck it?

Things don't appear so bad.
You have all your user files (/home) mounted at /dev/sda5. Your Windows "My Docs" is on another disk. So both should be safe. But still need to be backed up of course.
Re-installing Mint to /dev/sda2 and specifying /dev/sda5 as /home (without format) and defining the same users and passwords will bring everything back as it was. I do this regularly.

For the backup, you are going to need some space - maybe resize that NTFS on the TB disk. And yes you can take the disk out and use an enclosure and root will preserve permissions (if done properly). Best done from a liveCD as it avoids issues with mounted filesystems and files in use.

Our posts crossed in flight. I always toss them out if they start to go flakey.
For the backup, try fsarchiver - it does a CRC check on each file so you have some confidence. It's a full filesystem backup, so run it on /home - from a liveCD - you can install fsarcher on the liveCD and run it from there if you have a network connection. You'll need another disk to write the output file to.

1 members found this post helpful.

I'm currently backing up files from dev/sda5 to my TB disk. Problem is that I'm already starting to have long seek/access times. Estimated 7 hrs for 1.2 GB. Quite obvious drive is failing.