Mint installed, but not booting...

[883R]

Hello,

Recently I lost my job so I had to use my Windows 8.1 labtop to print a resume and found the experience to be painfully slow, so I decided to give Linux another try, I went with the Mint flavor.

Originally I wanted to keep both, windows and Linux but I did something wrong and I believe Mint wiped out the whole hard drive, not even sure if I still have the windows recovery partition. I wish I could reinstall Windows, but am okay with the lost if it is gone for good...

If someone could show me how to explore my current partitions using mint live usb and or reinstalling windows, that would be great...

But the main issue that I am having is that after a successful install of Mint, it won't boot...

Where do I go from here...

How to fix GRUB, how do I know if I have bios active or the new standard?

Right now I am using the USB Mint Live to be on the net and post here...

 

[atanere]

Hello,

Recently I lost my job so I had to use my Windows 8.1 labtop to print a resume and found the experience to be painfully slow, so I decided to give Linux another try, I went with the Mint flavor.

Originally I wanted to keep both, windows and Linux but I did something wrong and I believe Mint wiped out the whole hard drive, not even sure if I still have the windows recovery partition. I wish I could reinstall Windows, but am okay with the lost if it is gone for good...

If someone could show me how to explore my current partitions using mint live usb and or reinstalling windows, that would be great...

But the main issue that I am having is that after a successful install of Mint, it won't boot...

Where do I go from here...

How to fix GRUB, how do I know if I have bios active or the new standard?

Right now I am using the USB Mint Live to be on the net and post here...

Welcome to the forums, and hope that you find new employment soon. Windows 8 required UEFI, so you have that and not the old style BIOS. They are similar and many people still call it BIOS anyway.

During the Mint install, you would have been presented with an option to dual boot with Windows or to use the entire disk for Mint. If you chose the entire disk, then Windows and your recovery partition will be gone. While running your Mint Live USB, call up the GParted program and you can see your partitions on the /dev/sda hard drive. The boot partition is very small (100 MB to 500 MB) and may be fat32 or ntfs, but if you have other ntfs partitions then your recovery may still be intact. The recovery partitions are not very big either... mine is about 12 GB on a desktop machine, and mine is labeled "FACTORY_IMAGE," but yours may not have a label or may be something different. But even if the recovery data is present, it may be tough to access it and make it reinstall Windows.

You'll have to explain what you mean by "it won't boot." There are many different things that can be happening here. But to start, you should go into your UEFI settings and look for 2 things: secure boot and legacy mode (may be called BIOS mode, or CSM, or some other terms too). It is most common in using Linux to set secure boot to OFF (disabled), and legacy mode to ON (enabled). But some Linux distros can work without making these changes, or some can work some of the time... there is not much consistency dealing with UEFI.

If your laptop seems to boot, but then finishes up with only a black screen... that is a different problem. If so, you can shine a bright flashlight at the screen and see that it is actually running. There is a fix called nomodeset that usually works if this is your trouble.

If you are stuck at a grub_rescue> prompt, then I would guess the problem is with the UEFI partitioning, but it could be other things. If this is the case, I would probably make the UEFI changes I mentioned above, and then do a full re-install. I think that would be the quickest and easiest fix.

So, let's see what you find. Good luck!