Mint problem - stable alternative?
 

I'm quite new to Linux, and after a lot of trials ended up with Mint Mate (dual boot with Win7). I've been using it for a few weeks now with no real problems.
However, I've just transferred my system to a new pc case. The only alteration I made was to change the sata connector cable from sata 1 to sata 0. When I tried to boot to Mint I got screen after screen of errors (all unintelligible to me). I tried the recovery boot and got even more screens of errors. I did once get a desktop showing but it wouldn't actually do anything. So I'm now unable to open Mint – it just says there is an error on the disk drive.
Thank goodness for Win7! That opened first time, no problems – and continues to open fine (and I can access and copy files from there).
Obviously after such a catastrophic experience with Mint I'm going to always stick with dual boot. Unfortunately I'm now very reluctant to trust Linux with anything important – though I do want to go on using it for internet access. Can someone recommend a really stable (but easy to use) Mate distro please? Thank you.

My guess is that Mint can't find the Mint partition and that running update Grub would likely fix the problem, but that's really a shot in the dark; it would help the see the error messages

Perhaps you could take a photo of the errors and attach it to a post. I've found that setting my camera to "shutter priority" makes for the best photos of monitor screens.

To attach a file to a post, click the "Go Advanced" button at the bottom of the "compose post" window (just to the right of the "Post Quick Reply" button). The attach file dialog can be found there.

frankbell - thank you for your answer. Grub opens normally, and I can now access Mint by running recovery mode, then open as normal, then ignore errors. I've had all sorts of errors showing and tried various suggestions I found online but none worked. The point is that, as a newbie, if I hadn't had a dual boot system I'd really be in trouble. Because Mint freaked out so badly for no real reason (surely it should cope with a simple switch of sata headers) I no longer feel I can trust it, and would like to replace it rather than fix it. I just wondered if there are some distros that are more stable than others. I note that PCLinuxOS has mylivecd which looks useful, so I might try that.
However, I'd really welcome thoughts on the most stable (user friendly) distros (preferably with Mate - by far the best DE for me).