Hey all,

First-time poster, long-time-"finding my answers here via Google"-er.

I've become fed up with Ubuntu 11.10, and decided this morning to install Mint 12 onto my laptop.
So, what I did was I backed up my relevant data, booted via Mint 12 LiveCD, formatted my Ubuntu partition (leaving my Windows 7 partitions alone), and installed Mint.

Upon rebooting, I received the Operating System not found message. Oops! Looks like something with Grub isn't working. So, I googled some fixes for GRUB and attempt to apply ALL of them (with no success).

I've tried the following:
- Super Grub Disk
- Rescatux
- Using a LiveCD to mount the Mint installation at /sda5 via chroot and reinstall grub-pc
(Grub appears to see all of the partitions, and actually asks me which partitions I want to put it on)
- Reinstalling Mint again to the same partition.
Things to note:
While reinstalling grub during the chroot method, it gave me this error message:
error: cannot find a device for /boot/grub (is /dev mounted?).

Now, here's the really weird part. Earlier this year, I had decided I wanted Xubuntu more than Ubuntu, and installing xubuntu-desktop was causing some weird issues, so I decided to do a clean install. I had the exact same issue. The only fix was to reinstall Ubuntu 11.10 again.

In the past, I've never had any issues switching distros in this manner. After Ubuntu 11.10 though, I've been unable to reinstall anything except Ubuntu to fix GRUB.

Does Ubuntu 11.10 have some sort of custom GRUB that can't be altered/removed without breaking everything? If not, what is it that I'm not doing/missing to properly associate everything?

Note: If it's relevant to the issue at hand, my laptop is a Thinkpad X120e (supports UEFI and Legacy).

I would really appreciate a helping hand on this, as I've exhausted what little I know about Linux and GRUB at this point.

Thank you for taking the time to read this!

Hi,
My guess is that
error: cannot find a device for /boot/grub (is /dev mounted?).
has a lot to do with the problem. Did you run
before chrooting into it?

I didn't run that specific command (with -o), but I did follow a tutorial that gave several commands for rebinding /dev as well as a couple others (can't remember off the top of my head).

It turns out something was actually wrong with my partition table, so I spent the rest of the day backing up stuff from my Windows installation as well, and then I simply wiped the whole thing with a new partition table and installed Mint onto it without any further issue. I'm probably just going to use VirtualBox in the future if I need Windows 7 for anything.

Thank you for your help, though.

Now - that's the way to fix a M$ error.