Grub seemingly broken/missing, cannot boot from live USB
 

Hello everyone :hattip:

So i got an old computer from my father, he had installed Mint on it but i wanted to try other distros to see if any would be faster or easier to use. After trying several, installing them alongside Mind, i decided to stick with Mint. So i cleaned up the partitions were the other distros were and (obviously) did something bad, namingly broke Grub in some way (i think). The next time i booted the laptop, it welcomed me with this screen: https://i.postimg.cc/3w3R4rP8/IMG-20191111-123525.jpg

I tried to repair Grub with a live USB, but couldn't get any to boot ! everytime the computer welcomes me with this screen. I tried using different live distros, tried changing from Unetbootin to MultibootUSB... nothing worked.
EDIT: forgot to say i also tried forcing boot from USB devices first through BIOS, didn't work either.
I found this topic here which could be related to my problem, but i'm not sure. Also this one, i tried the solution tetloose suggested there, but it didn't work either.

Any idea of what's happening and how i can fix it ? :scratch:

Grub can malfunction in two ways. It is difficult to read your image (text would have been much better) but it looks as if you have got a normal grub prompt, not the dreaded grub rescue. This means that grub has found its files and has loaded a proper grub shell. What it can't find is the Linux kernel that it should be loading. The second link you gave was for a grub rescue prompt, so not relevant to your problem. You might find this link more useful.

You have to be careful about online tutorials, but linux.com is a respectable site.

yey thank you very much, it worked :D
could you quickly explain why live distros wouldn't boot ? and what i could've done wrong ? so i don't do it again inadvertently in the future :study:

We don't know yet what kind of firmware you have on your laptop, whether it's an old-fashioned BIOS or a UEFI. Either way, that's the chip that controls what boots and it seems determined to boot from the hard drive. Most computers require you to press a special key (usually F9 or F12) to boot from an external device. And I once had a laptop that would boot automatically from a device in any of the usb sockets on the right side but not from those on the left.

Booting a 'live' Linux from a usb requires you to go into the BIOS/firmware setting and setting that specific device to first boot priority. There are numerous method to do this and it is based on the Hardware you are using as each manufacturer seems to have a different method. What you need to do if you want to use a 'live' usb is first to verify the download by doing an md5 checksum or shasum which should be explained on the sitee. If not, an online search should work. If the usb fails to boot, best next option is to test on another computer to eliminate that as a possible problem.

What hazel says above.

for what had gone wrong, i was referring to the fact Linux Mint, the distribution installed on the laptop, wouldn't boot. is there something i could've done (or not done) to prevent this situation ?

Well, as we don't know precisely what you did in the lead-up to this, it's impossible to say. The point is, you were able to correct the problem, which is usually more than you can do in Windows when it goes wrong. Linux can generally be fixed; that's one of its charms. You seldom if ever need to reinstall the system from scratch.

When Windows goes wrong, it's pure bad news because you either have to reinstall it or fix it with some registry hack that you don't understand. Either way, you learn nothing. When Linux goes wrong, it's a nuisance but there's a silver lining. You can usually fix it and you learn in the process. I don't think I've ever had a Linux problem that I didn't learn something from.

Also you've clearly learned how to ask for help from the community in a sensible and informative way. Pretty good for a newbie!:thumbsup:

Haha yes, and i must thank you for that :) have a good day !

If your computer is an older Legacy system which uses code in the MBR (master boot record) rather than an EFI partition, this is a common situation. You initially had Mint then installed another Linux OS. If the new OS was using Grub, the DEFAULT on the new install is to write its boot code to the MBR. If you accepted the defaults on each new Linux install, you could expect each to overwrite the previous code. What you could and should have done before deleting the other Linux partitions when you decided to keep Mint, would be to boot Mint and install the Mint Grub boot code to the MBR.

If you are using an EFI machine, it doesn't work the same way but you haven't posted that info so...?

Ok sorry i skimmed past your repeated questions, i didn't really mean to, but i didn't quite understand what you were referring to. I'm a long Windows user, i thought BIOS was the way to refer to that pre-OS menu, whatever way it looked or worked. As I understand it, it's what you call the MBR ?
Anyway, i checked, the laptop boots in UEFI !

It's confusing! BIOS used to be the only program used for booting a computer. Now we have UEFI on newer machines. But a lot of computer manuals call the UEFI the BIOS because people are used to that name. My Lenovo manual does for a start. Whereas other people get apoplectic if a UEFI is called a BIOS because it's quite different (although it does the same job).

The MBR (Master Boot Record) is something different. It's on the hard drive, the first sector of an old-fashioned DOS disk. An old-style BIOS would simply hand over to whatever code was in the MBR of the selected drive. But if you have a UEFI there, the MBR on your drive will be a dummy and the actual boot code that the UEFI hands over to will be in a partition (usually partition 1).

Oh! i think I see now.
Thank you very much for this explanation :)