From your previous posts, this is what you wanted, correct?
You are still able to boot Mint, correct?

Does that mean you now get an option to boot Mint or xp? Is this the Grub menu?
If the only problem you have now is the entries in your windows boot menu, you will probably need to edit the xp boot.ini file.

(late response - I unsubscribed when I thought the issue was resolved).
I think the OP is saying he is back to the situation that started this thread - grub has replaced the MBR on the internal disk again, and the OP can only boot (at all) if the flash is installed.

Looks like there are (at least) two distinct discussions going on. Which leads to (even more) confusion.
The advice from mintybits looks to be spot on. The Mint update apparently brought in a new version of grub2 - which would trigger both an grub-install (which re-writes the MBR) and update-grub (which re-generates the cfg file).

The boot.ini is a hidden file in Windoze, but is just a text file and can be editted with notepad. @jimwg can you post the contents of your c:\boot.ini ?.

Usually due to a repair install & yes you will find 2 entries in boot.ini.
Like syg00 said it's a hidden file,but you can show hidden files
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/window...iddenfiles.htm

In post 14, he indicates he used his "macrium" CD to repair the xp bootloader and was then able to boot.
In post 25, he indicates he has installed the Mint Grub bootloader to the mbr of the flash and is able to boot by selecting it with F12 key.
In post 27, the OP seems to be saying he can boot xp but has two entries and needs to select the second entry to actually boot.
In post 29, he indicates he can still boot Mint using the F12 key.

It does appear that Mint installed a newer version of Grub to the mbr of the internal although I don't know why as he had Grub on the flash and had previously reinstalled the xp bootloader to the mbr of that drive.

I might not be reading this correctly but, it seems to me his only problem is the two entries in the xp menu??

Okay, the current situation is pretty much as it was before: From a cold boot-up on the PC I get a "Select OS" screen that wasn't there before (maybe because the Macrium select partition to fix feature added a "dummy" item somehow?) and selecting the second Windows item kicks off a normal boot. I'll hold back doing surgery on the boot.ini file since many say novices shouldn't mess with it, so the select OS screen is just a minor nuisance for now so other than that I'm okay for now. What's interesting is that I seemed to've stumbled across a Grub sda install issue on general Mint Updates that a lot of veteran linux mint blogs didn't know existed, and I wonder how many other newbies were put off using Linux when an innocent update effectively cripples access to their main PCs, and without guys like you around, infecting panic and linux disaffection among the unwashed. I really thought I was being careful and going by the book installing Mint 9 on our flash drives and I was! -- and there were no heads' up or caution signs about Grub or anything else during the install, which it worked perfectly well, attached and unattached the PC, until I allowed Mint to do its first update. As other linux blog users attest, for Grub to replace your PC's MBR without warning within a Mint Update is a serious design flaw and merits the attention of major Linux engineers. It might be a fun mystery for techies to solve, but as a newbie what happened scared the heck out of me thinking my PC was forever inaccessible and unbootable, and if it weren't for reassuring Sherlock mavens like you all, I probably would've chucked Linus for Windows or Macs or whatever.

Off topic:
I have to mention this because I'm stunned that flash drive blogs don't mention it, but using Mint flash drives have boosted the battery life of our vintage donated laptops almost by an hour and a half with most -- and those with older near dead charge batteries the laps run nearly a half hour or more! It's Incredible! There's virtually no fan or heat coming from the vents and the hard drives hardly ever purrs! I e-mailed Kingston and SanDisk about the "wear and tear" issue and they explained that new flash drives used this way can go for maybe around two years before any sign of decay, which makes it perfect to take the $$ wear and tear off our old machines, especially since home schools are often donated "surplus" logo flash drives from businesses and can purchase 8meg drives for $4.00, so having Mint flashes are a great deal!! That's why I must learn more about them!

Jim in NYC

Could you post a link to the forum/blog you refer to for Mint above? I googled this and found one post on the linux mint forums saying it was "possible" for the mbr to be overwritten during an update. No details were mentioned?

I expect that the initial "Select OS" screen you are seeing is a result of your boot repair software.
Linux Mint 9 was released two years ago. The updates you did would include any changes/additions since that time to Mint 9 so 500MB sounds about right. What exactly wasn't working that you chose to update? Security updates are generally a good idea but you should have had the option to select/deselect updates.

If you didn't see any bootloader option during the install, it was likely that you selected to do basically and auto-isntall such as "Install Alongside..." When you do this you are basically telling the installer to do whatever it wants with no input from you. If you selected Manual/Advanced option you would have had an option of where to install the bootloader.

I guess I'll spend a little more time googling this. I find it hard to believe an update would overwrite the mbr of your internal drive since you had your Grub on the mbr of the flash.

helpful link
http://sourceforge.net/projects/boot...urce=directory

Sorry so much reading!

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=102600

Jim in NYC

Thanks for the link. Interesting read. I would suggest you pay more attention to the last few posts by "breaker" as opposed to the ones by "mintybits" as they are more informed and accurate. Mintybits did explain that you could get rid of the two windows entries on your boot menu and gave you a link to a site which apparently explains that. Your bootinfoscript clearly shows to windows entries in the boot.ini file. Just make sure you delete the right one, they appear to have different title entries so it should not be that hard.

Lets start from this point.
Are you able to start windows xp without flash-drive connected?
Even though mint 9 is LTS why not use Mint 13 so you won't have to upgrade soon?
As far as usb drives & grub you have to really pay attention when installing grub, it does ask where to insall but even I miss it, usually when I'm rushing.

Yes, if Mint 13 is happy on a 8gig drive and the current customized user accounts on 9 can be carried over intact into the new install, I'd be happy to experiment and upgrade from Mint 9 to Mint 13, but Yancek brought up an secondary issue to me:

First I'd like to create a fully clone backup of my Mint 9 flash which could be easily loaded on a fresh flash without installing anything else or hassles. Many linux back-up programs just back-up the home directory which tells me that you still have the job of rebuilding everything else on a new drive.

Second, Yancek mentioned that my Mint 9 update swelled the original install by over .5 gigs; how much of that is just junk or redundant files left over from the initial installation? Can this bulk be pruned before backing up? How? Will it be carried over into the Mint 13 install along with the user accounts? Helpful places like http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2 don't really don't address non-techie layman concerns or competence that deeply.

Jim in NYC

You should be able to use remastersys to that. I used it to remaster Mint 12 several months ago and it worked fine. You will need to add a repository to your sources.lst but googling installing remastersys on Mint should give you a number of sites with detailed explanation on how to do this.

Pruning back what was installed during an update could be a problem. No one here knows what was updated. You could remove software you don't want/need. On the other hand, a lot of the updates would have been security updates and many of the others would be modifications to already installed software to make it work better.

If you do a new install of Mint 13, it won't carry anything over from your current installation. It's a totally new installation. You can upgrade from version to version but I don't know if you can upgrade from Mint 9, skip three releases and upgrade to Mint 13. You might check to see if Mint 9 is a LTS and if Mint 13 is also (Long Term Support).

Did you only see upgrade in my post?