"Deja-new!" ... almost ... I still need some help!

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Maybe somebody can suggest an easy fix here ...

I was trying some more tweaking in my BIOS setup, and something I did --who knows what -- caused this machine to do (it could see) nothing greater than a floppy disk at bootup. It could not find anything else. So, I reset the CMOS and started over, then each OS (except for Linux) "installed new devices" at bootup. Nothing was actually new, of course, but anyway ...

Everything else is fine now, but Linux only boots into some kind of console saying something about not finding drives and/or "swap". I could easily do a re-install to take care of that, but maybe there is some simpler way to tell Mint to install/re-install drivers?

I am willing to do my homework, but my vision makes searching and sorting very difficult for me.

Odd. I don't have an answer. However, there is no such thing as "install/re-install drivers" - you don't do that sort of garbage in Linux. I'd suggest you might use a live CD to see what your /etc/fstab looks like. Maybe you have managed to somehow juggle the drives around?

Yeah it sounds like the drives were reordered. Just reinstalling your boot manager and/or grub should fix it. Since linux looks for /dev/sda or whatever your partition is called, if you reorder its named something else. The same thing can happen if you shoehorn in another drive with a higher priority.

Ah, I had not thought of that! Lemme go look ...

Well, Win7 still shows both drives and all partitions and letters as they were, but I will check with EasyBCD tomorrow and try Mint again and takes notes if I still end up at the console.

ty

The sorts of problems you are experiencing seem typical to me. My first few months of linux were plagued at times by the strangest sorts of problems.. things i have never seen since. I too once ended up at that strange grub command line. Reinstalling fixed it faster than troubleshooting ever could.

For this reason my /home is placed on a separate partition(extended/logical) so that my data is not erased when i reinstall. Lucid Lynx will be the first ubuntu distribution that i havent adopted in the alpha 3 stage.

You are becoming less intrepid as your impetuous youth disappears over the horizon

Keep going with it Lee, as Fuzzy says often you get some very odd idiosyncratic difficulties. Why Mint BTW?

No, its just that I started walking slowly so that you could keep up.



Yeah, they almost seem tied to the newbie period. Lest, I haven't heard you have any trouble recently.



I suggested it, for the reason that it comes with codecs installed. It was a toss up, because I knew that Lee would find the Ubuntu philosophy of "humanity towards others" to be appealing.

"A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed." - Archbishop Desmond Tutu

So "/home" is like "Documents and Settings" or something? I have 46 gb for Mint, and I presently have that as 42-4 (two partitions) for system and swap. If I end up reinstalling, how would you make use of that total area, and how do you place "/home" separately?

Effectively, yes.

I'll show you an image of my partition setup.

You'll see one extraneous partition there.. /usr/local. It did not work as intended and will be removed next time. The idea was that software would install to that partition. It did not work. I suspect I should have created it before /root to get the functionality I wished.

So ignore that one.

[img][650:526]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3735901/partition-scheme.png[/img]

You can see that my / or /root partition is in a primary partition with the others subletting space in an extended partition. In fact, root could have went there too, or they could have existed in their own primaries. A drive is limited to 4 primary partitions, while extended ones can contain more. Windows, at least up to vista/seven have to be in a primary partition.

Now what all this means is this: when I go to reinstall, the format section of the installer gives me the option of specifying my partition use, and I can tell it to use the old /home but not to format it. My personal data will remain. You'll want to select manual partitioner in the installer. Its pretty easy. You'll get a warning that about not formating /home. Thats ok.

As far as I know, that is safe as houses. If I go from ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04, updated configuration files will still overwrite the old ones in my /home. I typically do a fresh install like this rather than going with the upgrade routine. Unfortunately this means I have to reinstall software.. which led to the attempt at a dedicated /usr/local.

At times I do not configure a linux-swap either. I have sufficient memory and dont use hibernate/sleep features. This time, because I was experimenting, I erred on the side of caution. A swap is recommended. This time I placed it more near the middle of the drive based on some of lau's reasoning.

At times, I have allowed 5 gigs for my /root, though typically I now allot 10.
I have four gigs of ram, so I made my swap a little bigger at 5. If I had less memory, I would have made a swap of double the ram size. As it turns out, my swap has never been touched, so I may eliminate it again.
/home is whatever is left over.

My ubuntu 10.04 partition will look like this.

/root 10gb
extended
---->swap 5gb
----->/home ???

If I were using windows it would be
windows
extended
---->/root
---->swap
---->/home

If needed I could then shoehorn in two extra windows partitions.

I think I understand ...

So if I do a 10-4-36 for /(root), swap and /home, will Mint "automatically" know the intent for and what to do with "/home", or do I need to specify something?

I would make the root primary and the others extended.

You'll specify that certain partitions are to be used in certain ways by selecting "mount point" for each in the manual partitioning stage.

The settings is stored in /etc/fstab. Normally, the installation program will write all the necessary entires for you. You only need to edit that file to change things after install.

Cool. My partitions are set and all systems (except 98, of course) all see them in the same way, and I have the re-install on the agenda for tomorrow morning.