I installed Mint on a 2nd hard drive on my old machine with XP OS on the original hard drive... using boot order to choose between them at start up. Had to get new computer...moved the Mint hard drive to the new machine...it shows up in Storage Devices in Settings, but doesn't show up in the Boot Order list in Settings. It also shows up in Device Manager as operating properly, but not in the "This PC" explorer window when using Windows 8.1 OS (on the original hard drive) Any advice would be appreciated.

Hi there,

since your original config was Windows on the first, Mint on the second HDD, the boot manager (GRUB, very probably) would have been installed on the first HDD, while the second one isn't bootable on its own.

So what you need to do now is reinstall GRUB on the first HDD. The easiest way to do so is to boot your PC from a Live CD of any contemporary distro that uses GRUB (Mint, Ubuntu, Debian for example) or from the GRUB rescue CD, and run the GRUB installation from there. In that process, the boot menu should be recreated automatically, containing Linux Mint on the second and Windows on the first HDD to choose from.

[X] Doc CPU

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If you were selecting the drive at boot on the old xp/mint machine, I would expect that you had the xp bootloader in the mbr of the first drive and Mint/Grub code in the mbr of the second drive. Wouldn't be much point using the method you did if this was not the case.

So now you have the same Mint drive with Grub in the mbr and can't boot it on the new computer with windows 8.1. This is more likely to be a problem with 'Secure Boot' which should be disabled to boot Mint. Also see if you have an option to enable Legacy boot. Also think that disabling 'Fast Boot' might help. Not sure if Fast Boot is the option, something similar.

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Thank you for your suggestions… I am a complete novice in all of this and it’s all good stuff to learn…but it didn’t help with the boot to linux problem.

After a lot of searching I found out the machine “does not support Secure Boot” (from the EasyBDC System Utility)…
I disabled Fast Boot…

It doesn’t have a Legacy Boot option…

I booted from a Puppy Linux live CD, which didn’t run well and caused problems when I went back to widows, that cleared up when I tried “Refresh PC”… then I booted with a Mint 16 Petra Cinnamon Live CD…that runs very well, without causing problems back in Windows…but it didn’t put a Linux option in the Boot Order automatically, is there a way to do that manually while in Mint?

I got EasyBDC and added a boot option for linux, pointing it to the Linux drive (sdb)…it gave me an option for Linux in the Boot Order, but selecting it just produced a black screen with a blinking cursor upper left screen…waiting for a command I guess.

I tried to install from the Mint 16 Petra Cinnamon Live CD…Got to the screen for adding Partitions but it wouldn’t let me, wouldn’t let me delete the two there already either (Swap and another one)…tried to install anyway and it said I needed Partitions…

I’m not sure, but it may be an UEFI machine…

It is a refurbished HP Compaq 8000 Elite CMT PC…evidently a “business” PC before it’s new life as my problem child…

…just found an HP “Technical white paper: AHCI and RAID on HP Compaq Elite 8000, 8100, 8200, and 8300 Business PCs”…I’ll try looking at that and maybe I’ll learn something…

Thanks again for your help…and I would certainly appreciate any more ideas!