So I was setting up my new Linux mint along side windows 10 which I had installed on an external hard drive and everything worked great; I had windows 7 on my internal hard drive, and a duel boot win10/mint on an external drive, the problem arose when I tried to install burg, I was expecting that since I had installed it on mint(which was on the external) that the boot menus would only show up when I booted the external drive, this however was not the case and it somehow loads up only when I boot from the INTERNAL drive AND have the EXTERNAL drive connected, otherwise It would say something along the lines of "grub not found entering grub repair" I'm completely lost and I have no idea where to start for fear of messing up the system even furthur.

And help you'll be greatly appreciated.

Hopefully you have Win install media. This has some function on it to fix your boot sector which will reestablish the Win boot loader on the MBR.

You can find directions by searching for Win boot sector or maybe win boot loader. Don't use Win so have no idea.

I have not use the LM installer. But I have used the Ubuntu installer in the past. You are asked where to install the boot loader in every installer I have used. That is a lot of them. Read things before hitting OK.

If you can't fix the Win boot loader there is an option you could try. Install LM on the internal. You have room for it. Win installs are way over sized. You need to have 2 Win partitions.

Never touch the first partition this is your Win boot sector.

The second partition is probably also oversized. You can, using gparted in your current LM on an unmounted internal (The Win drive). If that drive is mounted you can unmount it with gparted. Gparted will generally, and always should, refuse to mess with mounted partitons. You can then shrink that partition from the right side of the display in gparted to the left. I would cut the free space on that partition to about half of what is currently there.

The third partions is probably the "recovery" partition put on by the OEM to supposedly do the same job as the install disk tools. I have tried this a few times and found it fails very reliably to do anything. Move this partition to the left so that it abutts the second partition. Then shrink it down so that it has about 10 or 15 G free space.

If you find the instructions for attempting to fix the boot sector and it fails (likely in my experience - admittedly limited) you could do the sensible thing and simply delete that 3rd partition but that is a rather scary thing to do and avoiding a heart attack is more important than that little extra room.

There is undoubtedly a 4th partition. This is the source of all those installers of Win applications you don't want on your desktop anyway. Get the ones you want, delete that partition.

Now you will probably have more than enough room for a Gnu/Linux install of any distro including LM or Ubuntu which are generally rather large and bloated.

The problem will be that you have 3 partitions already on there. With a MSDos partition table which is long out of date with the size of modern drives (the reason for the change to uefi from traditional Bios using the GPT table) you are limited to 4 primary partitions. You should have at least 2.

You need to creat therefore what is called an Extended partition. This is an old hack to make more than 4 partitions possible. Works great. Gparted has a box that tells you the Created As (Primary, Logical, Extended). You want Extended.

Now you can create Logical partitions within that partition.

Swap should go at the end (right end of the graphic partition display) and be fairly small, hard to say not knowing your amount of ram. If you are going to suspend or hibrinate your GNU/Linux system the recommendation is for 2x the size of your ram. This is actually only for one of those 2 functions, not sure which it is, don't ever do either. I would recommend at least 1 gig /swap no matter the size of your ram because you can have stuff shuttled there if you run resource hogging applications which I do.

If you are installing the system on just a root partition that can take all the rest of your free space within the Extended partition.

It would be better to create a / partions of 10 or 15 gigs at the begining of that Extende Partition and then another partition for /home.

You will be using the manual partitioning option in the installer to do this. With the partition created beforehand you can then just point the installer at the partition you want to use for / and (hopefully) /home.

If there is a problem with gparted not liking this proceedure you can do it from the partitioning agent in the installer. This will put both Win and LM (asuming that is what you want to use) on the same drive as Win and your problem with grub will be over.

You can then boot to the new install, turn on your external, repartition it to one partition with ext4 format (or ntfs if that blows your skirt up) and use it as a data partition. This is a good policy asuming the external is a good and relatively new drive because it separates your systems from the data and protects the data that way.

Now for my personal opinion as a user that started with MSDos as my OS, then Win and now Gnu/Linux as to the best way to fix your problem.

Reformat your internal drive and install Gnu/Linux there. Fixes every problem you ever have with Windows.

If you absolutely need Windows for work this may not be good. In that case I would still do that same thing and install Virtualbox on Linux and use your Win Install media to install windows in a VM on VB. Don't give Win access to the internet or USB ports. Share one directory with Windows in a small ntfs partition, put anything that needs sent, recieved (through Gnu/Linux host system) there and pick it up with Windows. The 2 systems will both be running, just open the VM in a dedicated Work Station and you can switch to it by simply going to that workstation. Windows is actually pretty secure if you don't allow it to face the web. Before moving files to Windows run ClamAV on the shared directory.

I also recommend something not based on Ubuntu such as Mageia 5. Mageia 6 should be out shortly. Ubuntu has a crap "security model". I used it for several years. Will no longer allow it on my box and respins (like LM or Lxle) get a tiny install on an external for looking at them temporarily to see what the fuss is about. They are never permanent installs because I consider them to be a security hazzard.

This is Gnu/Linux these choices are up to you. I don't have to approve of what you do. It is your box.

I certainly listen to what other users think, sometimes I do those things. But it is my box and I do with it exactly what I want to do. With that attitude I have a real problem not extending that right to others. Even if I think they are wrong. I am positive that many of my practices would be looked at with horror by many other users.

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Is it UEFI boot?

Did you allow the Linux Mint installer to install Grub first and than you installed burg?

If you see grub rescue> that means it couldn't find normal.mod, so it probably couldn't find any of your boot files.

https://www.linux.com/learn/how-resc...g-grub-2-linux

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unifie...ware_Interface

Geez, I wasn't expecting such a long post, I kinda feel bad though, because all I had to do was repair the MBR.

I do still have some other problems though and I'm not sure if I should post them here or make another thread... I'll just post it here and I'll move if the admins get mad for bumping an "solved" forum or some other rule I wasn't aware of...

Anyway, for one reason or another windows shuts down if it reads my Linux partition. Basically, I converted my Linux partition to a format windows could read, and then I tried to re size the partition, then windows said my drive needed to be scanned and whenever that pops up, if I click on any of the buttons my computer shuts down to prevent damage. now my external drive(the one with linux) cant find the grub menu. I'm currently trying to get the drive to not crash my pc so I can do some work w/ it; and then I'm gonna reinstall. I'm hoping that there's a better option so I don't have to go through the reinstall process.

Yes Grub was installed first, and then I installed burg. I'll look over these links and see if I can fix my external without needing a re install; though, with the drive crashing my pc these options might be hard to execute.

Thanks guys.

Expalin that. A default install of windows cannot write to or read a Linux filesystem so if you formatted the Linux partition to a windows filesystem you've basically overwritten whatever you had there. You might be able to recover some data with testdisk. If you formatted the Linux partition to a windows filesystem that would explain why Grub can't be found because most of it's files are/were on the Linux partition.

I wanted to shrink my Linux partition and I didn't know how to do this through the linux os, so I went on over to windows 7 and installed a program called ext2 volume manager, used that to change the filesystem from 83 linux to 07 hpfs/ntfs, from their on I went to diskmanagement.exe and shrunk the partition.

The Linux Mint installation medium has the partition manager GParted on it. Using it is explained at the link below, the GParted Manual.

http://gparted.org/display-doc.php%3Fname%3Dhelp-manual

I would expect changing the partition type from 83 to 7 would overwrite the filesystem. Linux won't run on an ntfs partition nor will windows run on a Linux filesystem. Not sure what the status of your machine is now, can you boot anything?

I had actually done the same transition from 83 to 7 previously and then changed it back to 83 and it booted up fine, the interesting thing is that grub still boots up, or at least grub repair does, so perhaps grub will be able to boot fully if I change back to 83. Correct me if I'm wrong but, since grub repair loads the linux partition couldn't be completely wiped out right?

I don't know, I've never done anything like that and never heard of anyone doing it.

Your original problem of having the boot menu show when booting from the internal is most likely the default setting when installing the bootloader. That as far as I know, is alway to the MBR of the primary drive unless the person installing makes a change. If you want to boot only when selecting the external drive, you would need to install Grub or Burg to the MBR of that drive pointing to the Mint installation partition.

I'm not really sure what you are trying to accomplish. A default windows install doesn't recognize Linux partitions and won't read them and certainly not write to them. There is third party software for windows which should be able to do this if that's your goal.

The information above on bootloader applies only to MBR installs. If you are using UEFI/GPT, the methods are totally different.
The link below explains reinstalling Grub2 if that's what you want. I've never used Burg so don't know how that would work.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Gr...talling_GRUB_2

You say it only boots when the external HDD is plugged in.

Do the operating systems on your internal HDD boot w/o the external plugged in?

If so I suspect that when Grub installed and than you installed Burg it created conflict; thus having 2 bootloaders.

Like yancek said Grub or Burg would need to be installed to the MBR.
Did you recall; did you install Burg to the MBR?

Were you able to repair the MBR? {Windows}

Are you getting input/output errors?

As of right now I'm trying to reinstall grub on my external drive, so I can get the boot loader. So far I've managed to set the file system back to 83 Linux and gotten the drive to stop crashing my computer.

Yes, I fixed that by repairing the MBR though.

Yea I did it through a terminal; probably not the smartest idea.


I think the easiest way to handle this is to re-install Linux; I actually wanted to use Ubuntu but I figured Mint would be a better system for warming up to Linux for the first time. So I'll Install Ubuntu to another partition; that should repair, or should I say replace, the boot loader so I can boot.

Thanks for your help guys, God Bless.

Let us know how it goes:-

You only need the boot loader on one drive, preferably the internal drive. If you boot from the install CD/DVD, select rescue, boot up, choose the linux root partition to chroot to, you can reinstall grub2 to the MBR, and it should find the other operating systems, and just work. The last I looked NTLDR needs to be manually configured to boot Linux.

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