On a new computer (less than 3 months), I originally installed Fedora 16 to give it to try.
I wasn't all that impressed and un-installed it about a month ago and I'm not exactly sure how it happened but I deleted the partition which had grub installed on it, or at least that's what I think happened because when I rebooted my computer It wasn't able to get into any bootloader.
Eventually I was able to run the Windows recovery and repair the MBR and I was able to boot back into Windows.
Since then I've installed Linux Mint 14 and Ubuntu 12.04, and I can see using the EaseUS software in Windows that the partitions have been succesfully created and there was no problems during the installation process, however when I start up the computer it just goes straight into Windows and not GRUB.
I haven't installed a Linux OS for some time but I'm sure the partition set up I used for both Mint and Ubuntu should work.
I have 2 x 500gb hard drives – one is purely for data, one has 250gb aside for OS's and 250gb aside for data.
On the second drive the Windows OS occupies approximately 100gb.
Both Ubuntu and Mint were configured approximately like this:
ext4 - 3gb /boot
swap - 4gb
ext4 - 12gb /
ext4 - 25gb /home
I'm not 100% sure now but i'm certain I choose the bootloader to load out of the partition /boot (makes sense?) for both of them. I definately did for Ubuntu cause I installed that yesterday, but I can't fully remember for Mint.
Any help as to where I can go from here as I'm a bit stuck. This is the first time I've had trouble installing a Linux system. I wonder if it has to do with me possibly deleting the grub partition and having to have Windows automatically repair the MBR between uninstalling Fedora and installing Mint and Ubuntu….
Best Answer
You should boot into a Linux live session and reinstall GRUB manually. Have a look at this page for example.
The basic procedure involves booting into the live sesion, mounting your
/
partition, usingchroot
to set it as/root/
and then installing GRUB.There is a very good answer on how to use
chroot
here.The Ubuntu (will apply to any linux really) instructions on reinstalling GRUB are here.