My wife finally gave up on Windows and asked me to install Linux. I zapped all the Windows partitions except one called Data.

The first sign of trouble was that the partition tool could not mount the NTFS Data partition. No problem, just mark the partition 'do not use', I can sort that out later. The installation finished and I rebooted. Not much happened.

So I decided too look at the BIOS. All the boot order options had gone. I reverted the BIOS to defaults and nothing interesting changed. So I put the USB stick back in and it booted to the Mint demo mode.

Now I clicked on the Data drive and received a long error message saying that it is unable to mount the /media/mint/Data ...exited with non zero status... unclean file system... Metadata kept in Windows cache refused to mount... NTFS partition in unsafe state. Return to Windows and shutdown properly or mount the volume read only.

It seems that I wrongly assumed that the computer had been shut down
and was in hibernate mode.

I need to know how to boot using the HDD. It would also be very useful to be able to access the Data drive

No Linux system I am aware of will mount a hibernated ntfs partition which appears your case because that could corrupt the filesystem. Windows automatically by default hibernates, I guess so that it appears to boot faster? You should have turned off hibernation and fast boot and anything related before you removed windows. Turn off anything related to fast boot/hibernation in the BIOS. Not sure that will work but...? If you can boot Mint, you should be able to access the partition in read only mode, see the link below for simple instructions.

https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-mount...mode-in-Ubuntu

If you don't have windows to boot to to shut down properly, you may have to then copy the data from the windows partition to another windows partition you create.

so you do or do not have linux installed on hdd?
it is linux that is giving you greaf about the hdd
"exited with non zero status... unclean file system... Metadata kept in Windows cache refused to mount.."

that is because Windows marks all ntfs with some bit thingy that causes it to give you that error in Linux unless you shut Windows down not in hibernation, It is because it is in hibernation it marks these ntfs partitions with that by whatever means to give anything such as Linux that error.

It is to preserve the state of all drives until Windows is brought out of hibernation.

What I did and do, I turned off hibernation, and fast boot in advance power setting in Windows, and I always reboot Windows then let grub take me to Linux. Keeping the ntfs partitions unmarked by whatever means Windows marks them to set it unusable because it thinks it's rebooting.

You can access a hibernated Windows drive by deleting the hyberfile.sys. NOTE: DO NOT DO THIS ON A WORKING WINDOWS INSTALL!!! Windows will self-destruct it's bootloader and that is no fun to fix.

Edit: Here you go. http://www.hecticgeek.com/2013/01/mo...u-hybrid-boot/

The hint about hiberfile.sys put me on the right track. This command sorted the problem with the NTFS Data drive:
The system is still unbootable from the HDD. I confirm that I did a full install onto the hard drive and it completed successfully including installing GRUB.

It boots straight into the BIOS which sees the HD and has selected SATA MODE AHCI. The only boot options visible are:.
Fast Boot Disabled
Launch CSM Disabled (if I enable CSM it restarts with it disabled)

Before it showed the hard drive, a couple of USB options - all the usual stuff. It has remembered something as it will boot from a USB stick. From there I can see the hard drive.

My guess was that Windows is still fighting from the grave.Probably the boot flag is not on /dev/sda2 All this stuff is beyond my pay grade, the last time I had a windows box it was running XP.

I fired up gparted and found that /dev/sda2 was not flagged as bootable, I have no idea why. I changed this and rebooted but nothing had changed.

What do I try next?

I don't mind doing a fresh install if that might help.

Are you trying to install as efi or legacy? if your installing as efi, my guess is you removed the Windows boot partition which is also where Linux would write its bootloader. To fix you have to create a small < 1gb fat32 EFI partition in the beginning of the drive and give it bootable flag.

Another way to do this is boot Linux as legacy and install grub to your mbr, this should work great since Windows no longer needs to boot as EFI.

lets recap: you installed Linux while Windows was in Hibernation mode. This caused it to fail to even boot into Linux using grub that is installed onto /dev/sda.

You have no access to your NTFS Partitions whatsoever due to the state that Windows was in while installing Linux. It caused yourself to no longer be able to boot into Windows in order to take it out of Hibernation mode so it will set all ntfs partition back to a normal writable and readable state because grub is no even working.


Hopefully you have a means to burn to a usb stick, if yes. I'd burn supergrub2 to a usb stick so you can hopefuly boot into Windows and hopefully take it out of hibernation so it can reset your NTFS Partitions, and hopefully you didn't screw it up by messing with the hiberfile.sys file.

whither or not you have to reinstall linux and grub is beyond me. The important part I think is to get Windows to reset your NTFS partitions to normal so you can get to your data again that is on them.

https://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/

this is MBR not EFI line of thinking

Which version of windows did you have installed?
Was it an EFI install? If 8 or 10 pre-installed, most likely it was.
Did you install Mint EFI? If you boot the Mint install medium and run this command from a terminal, it will show if an EFI partition exists:

Lower Case Letter L in the command.

Might be best to see more details which you can get by booting the Mint install medium and going to the site below. Download boot repair using the 2nd option (ppa) and run it selecting the option to Create BootInfo Summary and do not try to repair. You should get a link to post here which will show enough details so someone can suggest a possible solution.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair