grub not working - RESOLVED

[jbs1136]

I downloaded linuxmint-201109-xfce-dvd-64bit.iso, burned a dvd and installed to my laptop, Gateway MX6442 (AMD64 Turion, 512m ram, 100 GB hdd). When I first booted after installing I received the following:

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GRUB loading.
Welcome to GRUB!

error: unknown filesystem.
Entering rescue mode...
grub rescue>

At this point I thought I might have screwed up the install so I redid it and made sure that I used ext4, which is what I used on my desktop install of LMDE. After checking through the documentation, searching the forum, googling quite abit and reading about grub I discovered some of the problem. I entered the following:

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grub rescue> set prefix=(hd0,3)/boot/grub
grub rescue> set root=(hd0,3)
grub rescue> insmod normal
grub rescue> normal

This gave me a normal grub and I hit enter on the linuxmint line. It printed some stuff on the screen and then went to black with the mouse spinning in the middle. I hit ctrl-alt-F1 and got into tty1. There was the usual stuff about setting up and starting but at the bottom after the Samba daemons started I got:

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startpar: services(s) returned failure: live-installer ... failed!
Linux Mint Xfce Edition mint tty1
mint login:

I am not able to log in as user, only as root. Just to be safe I tried creating another user with a new password and that would not log in either. I tried update-grub and it found the linux and initrd images, Windows XP and the recovery partition. I rebooted and the same things happened. At this point I am lost. I can't find anything that tells me where to go from here. Any help or suggestions are appreciated.

john

[spandey]

You have mentioned your HDD is 100 GB. You have XP, recovery and Mint. So how much space you have given to various mint partitions?

[jbs1136]

I have 10 g set for / and 40 g for /home and 1 g for swap. I have been using this partitioning for several years with several different distros, kanotix, sidux, slackware, zenwalk, salix, debian testing and so far haven't had a problem.

john

[spandey]

If you have been using Linux for a while than please download and run bootinfoscript from here http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootinfoscript/and post the output to the forum.

[jbs1136]

Thanks for your help and suggestions. Sorry it took so long to get back, for some reason I am not getting an email when there is a reply and that is why I haven't checked back. I am going to mark this as resolved. Since I last posted I have tried the LMDE version with both gnome and xfce. I also used a 3d disk which is the one I used to install on my desktop. I actually got into the distro a couple of times. It is not a grub problem, the installation is not installing completely. No home directory for the user is being created, fstab is blank, a other things are not completed. I have tried at least twice on each of 3 different dvd's and get the same results. I did install debian squeeze without a problem. I am going to put something else on the laptop, I don't use it very often and it is not that important.

Thanks again for your help

john

[varonbondumb]

it says "resolved"

Did you find a fix?

[jbs1136]

No, as I said in my last post, I put something else on the laptop. Since the problem with that their have been problems on my desktop also so I went back to straight Debian everywhere.

I put resolved because I didn't know what else to put.

[Schoelje]

For anybody ending up here looking for the startpar error solution: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 8&t=106318