Distracted, was gonna format a USB drive, didn't select the right drive obviously, clicked, applied, "oh no !" I deleted Sda1, Grub and all the rest gone. Then I thnk I made matters worse by trying to boot it ? So the tutorials I have tried failed. Happens to been a full encrypted mint 17 drive. Rescatux had nothing useful to say, (that I understood), certainly didnt fix it.

What should my next step be ? I made a new ext2 patition at the boot drive. I know the data is still there in my main partitions. How do I re-install grub and my boot drive ?

***As usual and has been the case with this so far. Every tutorial I try fails. The commands are always not recognized, so many flavors, and configs of linux. Such a small % of the linuk help posts and pages seem to work with wtv version I am using. I often dutifully cut and past into my console commands that are not recognized. I have some understanding of the basics, and I am open to try most suggestions. Ubuntu people would probably be best people for me to talk to now. Whoever gets me back into this install will recieve a reward, gift card or something !

I presume you doing partitioning when you "applied" your change, right? If that's all you did, testdisk should be able to locate your original partitions, though it will have the wrong size for the encrypted partition. That's because the LUKS header doesn't indicate the size of the container, so testdisk will assume the minimum size -- just big enough for the LUKS header. You will just have to adjust the size of the partition to fill the available space up until whatever follows on the disk. Do not try to use any advanced partitioning tool for this. It will either (a) refuse to resize an encrypted partition, or (b) do things wrong and overwrite part of your data. Use a basic partitioning tool like fdisk.

If you like, just use testdisk to do a quick search and post the resulting log file.

[EDIT] I notice you said you made a new ext2 boot partition. Did you actually format a new filesystem there (gparted would do that)? That's unfortunate, since it wiped out your old boot partition.

I've done this too and testdisk figured it out after playing with it for an hour and installing grub again.

I'd be worried that the new /boot is larger than the old - if it was formatted, that might eat the (following) luks header as well. Everything is gone in that case.
Let's see that testdisk log.

Wonder if I get the post exactly. Not sure I get what is going on. (as usual)

I'd just get rid of it and gpart it over and reinstall if you had your OS on it. been there done that. you're not the only one.

Re-read post #2.
As an aside, Mint "fully-encrypted" disks aren't - they have a separate unencrypted partition for /boot (and another for /boot/efi if applicable). However everything else is defined on the luks container - root, home, swap, the lot.

I tried rescatux, and boot-repair-disk. I cannot get to a place to ask for testdisk. When I boot from the hdd which I deleted sda1 from from I get >grub rescue. boot-repair-disk has all of my grub details greyed out, and I would have dl'ed testdisk from boot-repair-disk which seems to use ubuntu repositories but It could not find it. Then I tried to mount a USB to at least post the boot-repair-disk info which was a lot, but it would not let me mount a USB to record that to post it. I still believe somehow I can reinstall grub and, it will be fixed. I deleted , and formatted /sda1, if the LUKS info was on there I guess Im f'ed. Yes I have given up some installs due to similar, and it would not be the END, but sure would be nice to recover some of that data, Thanks sinecerely for the help so far.

*Still gonnna try get a grub going again

error file/grub/i386-pc/normal mod not found

Still thinking I can fix this thing, although spiritually ready to move on. I tried some so called fool proof stuff from the grub rescue prompt. Not feeling too sharp of mind these days, and get lost various directories. Missing some fundamentals about boot partitions and stuff I should know about by now, I am a linux nub, although have been enjoying it for years. I was gonna try super grub rescue.iso and the sob wont install on a dvd for some reason. Rescatux just dumps strings of numbers and tells me nothing, I cant tell if it finished, what it was doing or what it can do. For fucks sake I just want to repair or replace my grub2 and repair my MBR. May I find the clarity of mind, and innate intelligence to do this ( and wish the same for others in similar spots). Gparted is one heck of a dangerous tool in careless hands.