Hey guys I am trying to set up a dual boot with Linux Mint and Windows for a friend on his HP laptop. It worked the first time but we cannot boot back into it without it failing. Also when we would try to reinstall it and boot from the flash drive Linux can only see the storage on the flash drive but none of the drives on the pc.
Are you sure the hard drive still works?
Does the laptop bios see the drive?
we were able to boot into Windows, is it possible that part of the partition would be broken?
Oh I see.
You might want to rework your post because it is a little unclear. It originally seemed like you could not boot into windows or linux.
Here is what you do. Go back into windows. Back up all the data.
Download partition wizard and see if the linux partition is there. If it is, erase it.
Next, forget linux mint. Either use LMDE or the fedora cinnamon spin. Plain old linux mint has some rather weird issues going on right now, so just avoid them right now.
Install either distro onto the erased partition. Profit.
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thanks, I will try that when I get up, I think there is a problem with the partition itself but if grub appears what command should I use to boot into Mint if it were to pop up? I had also tried directly loading an EFI file but for some reason it would either return to Grub or boot into Windows?
Ok.........you really need to be more specific with your questions.
If grub comes up, but mint is not on your option list, and it does not show up in the boot media, then there is a chance it could be corrupted.
To find out, plug in your linux mint boot media. Go to a command line and type fdisk -l
That will give you a list of any hard drives available. You should see your flash drive and your main computer hard drive.
Your main hard drive should be /dev/sdb
You should be able to also see the partitions, but if you dont, simply type fdisk -l and then your drive (/dev/sdb)
If that mint partition does exist, it probably is not mounting. I would try to mount the drive with gparted since gparted will give you a more detailed error if something goes wrong.
If it does mount, and you can pull information from the drive, then you need to update grub. There are a bunch of how to update grub videos and tutorials that explain the process a lot better than I could.
If it doesn't mount and there is an error, or the drive still does not exist, then we have a bigger problem on our hands.
Dual-booting Mint and Windows can be really tricky. If you have separate hard drives, I would suggest installing Mint on its own and keeping its own boot partition and such on the separate drive, and leaving windows alone on the other drive. I've had issues before where Windows, when first installing, likes to spread itself across multiple drives so that when you install Mint on the separate drive, it overwrites some windows files.
One important point would be to make sure that secure boot is disabled in the BIOS. Windows machines typically come with secure boot enabled so that the BIOS verifies the OS at start up, and typically this restricts it to booting to Windows and not many other operating systems. Mint will suggest this, so I would double check that it has been disabled first, so that you can boot to Mint once it's successfully installed.
If you're dual-booting from the same drive, then when you boot up into the installation media, one of the parts of choosing where the Mint installation will be placed is that you choose a device for the bootloader. If you selected Mint's own partition, and upon reboot it defaults to boot to windows and you haven't seen a GRUB menu or anything, then it's likely that it has successfully installed, but you need to press F8 or something similar at start up and select to boot to Linux manually. With seperate drives on my PC, this is how I decide which OS to boot up, since I've had trouble with Windows trying to rewrite its bootloader at times and overwriting GRUB. Just some suggestions.
My dau's laptop had a HD test funtion in her bios. It barely acted up but the bios test said it was bad.
we did that and it said it was good.
Sorry @chiefshane, the only other thing I can think of is install Mint after Windows or maybe an older version. Wish I knew more and could be more helpfull.