Salutations! I am moderately illiterate when it comes to computers, so bear with me. If I'm missing some pertinent bit of information, please point it out.

I am running Windows 7 on a 64x computer, and have decided to dual boot Mint 15 as a first Linux OS. "Alrighty." I thought, and followed the PDF instructions from the Mint site. This went along well, and I seem to have completed it without a problem. However, upon restarting, the boot menu refused to show the Mint OS. I thought then that I may have installed the OS incorrectly, so I plopped the ISO disk back in an ran the installation program again. It noted that Mint had installed to the partition I assigned it to. Perhaps some boot menu setting was preventing the recognition of the new OS, but with my limited understanding my fiddling proved unsuccessful.

I feel like I'm missing some obvious catch that prevents recognition, and I don't fully understand what I'm missing.

Hi there,

don't worry about that.

So Windows was there first, and then a Linux distro as the second OS being installed. That's the recommended order which usually makes a lot less trouble than the other way round (because Windows Setup doesn't honor the presence of another OS).

At that point, I miss some importatnt information from your side:

• What's your is your partition scheme? You did provide a partition of its own for Mint, did you? Or even another HDD?
• Where did you have the boot manager (GRUB) installed during the Mint setup? In sda, or in sda1? That's a significant difference: In sda means GRUB starts from the MBR and will be the primary boot manager; in sda1 means GRUB will be installed in the partition's boot sector and another boot manager (for example Windows') has to do the first stage.
• Did you see the GRUB boot menu after the procedure, or the regular Windows boot manager, or none at all?
• Which of the two OS's was actually booted after that installation? WIndows or Linux?

Well, from your description you might have installed GRUB to sda1 instead of sda.

[X] Doc CPU

1 members found this post helpful.

Oh! I see! I reinstalled Mint to sda and GRUB appeared all fancy and nice. Mint is running fine.

Thank you very much!