Issues With Dual Booting Mint w/Win 7

Hey Guys & Gals, 

Long time listener, first time caller and i'm having issues with getting started with Linux. I've never used Linux bar a few minutes, so i am a total newb at this. 

So i'm trying to install Linux Mint onto a harddrive which has 50Gb of storage space free (more can be allocated) and the rest is formatted as NTFS. It isn't the boot drive for windows, that boots off a SSD. 

So unlike when i tried Ubuntu, the Mint installation completes and asks me to restart so i can leave the Live CD and go onto the installed version, that makes sense. However, when the system restarts the message: "Unknown Filesystem Grub Rescue" comes up with a sort of command line. 

Is there anything you guys could recommend to help a underling out? If it helps, the bootloader is installed on the SSD which is the primary boot drives. 

 

Thanks!

Nothing bad, you just didn't configure GRUB right. You can probably circumvent the problem by telling your BIOS to boot of the other HDD. It will have found Windows automatically and present the option to boot windows 7 bootloader too, but you can also move GRUB to the SSD, for which case I'll leave the exact command to configure and update your GRUB to the Ubuntu specialists of the forum, it's been a while since I used GRUB instead of GRUB2 or efilinux.

I didn't configure GRUB at all, or so i think... I did bypass the boot order but had the same issue there aswell, it just would not boot. I did look in windows to see if i could add Mint to the OS list but it wouldn't show, and likewise in Mint installtion it wouldn't detect any other OS's.

GRUB detects other operating systems and the installer adds them to the grub list.

Maybe you lifted the live DVD from the ODD too fast, I don't know, in any case, GRUB is installed so it's just a matter of GRUB update.

See step 2 on this guide.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair you can use your mint cd/flash drive for this.

Thanks for that, im going to reinstall Ubuntu, just as people seem to think its a good one to begin on. Do you know what sizes i should set the partitions to? I can't do the automatic thing as i have the rest of the installtion drive set to NTFS.

Okay as an update, Ubuntu is installed and i'm posting from it now :D. One question though, in BIOS i see two "ubuntu bootloader" and one "windows bootloader" and even if i set the primary one to Windows, it still loads Ubuntu. 

Is there a way to make it so it displays a list on system start? Oh and another thing if i may, i keep getting a message saying that a hard drive is reporting bad health and its the SSD i boot windows off of, the SMART status reports its being used outside of parameters, is that okay?