Five distros on one PC? Not there yet
That's his new laptop... he runs about 35-40 distros on his old laptop! It's amazing! If you want to know about multi-boot, Chris is definitely your Wizard!
My beef with OO, hard to select specific lines (a click with MSO but need to sweep cursor across with OO).
We are almost to the point of needing a new thread for Office discussion too. OpenOffice forked into LibreOffice and took most of the developers with it and created The Document Foundation. All the Linux distros also followed LibreOffice. Oracle shortly afterwards gave OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation... they still develop it, but slower. So LibreOffice is more current and more widely developed... if you haven't tried it, I can only suggest that you do. LibreOffice will easily solve your "beef" that you have with OO..... if you want to select a word on a line, double-click the word. If you want to select the entire line,
triple-click anywhere in the line.
So, let's try to get back to your HP Pavilion problem. Your screenshot was mostly unreadable, but I could see that you have an AMI BIOS from 2009. My daily desktop is also a HP Pavilion with a 2009 BIOS, but mine is not AMI (it shows no "brand") but it looks very similar to yours. I bought my HP on the day Windows 7 was first released in 2009, and in that period of time.... I am about 99.9% certain that your motherboard is the old style BIOS, like mine, and it is not UEFI based.
What I'm trying to do at the moment is to establish the facts of what you have, and maybe to identify how you got into the situation that you're in. Wizard will be better to guide you toward repairs of what you have if you choose not to start from scratch as I suggested earlier.
Older BIOS systems use (almost exclusively) the MBR (Master Boot Record) method of managing filesystem allocations (partitions) on a hard drive. MBR is typically restricted to hard drives of 2 TB or less, so your 3 TB drives may indeed have some trouble. Perhaps if you would create partitions before beginning, such as three 1 TB partitions (one for Windows, one for Mint, and one for Manjaro) it might make one of these drives usable, but I'm not sure without researching more, or maybe just having you try it. Anyway, you haven't committed to changing drives at this point.
Newer UEFI systems don't use MBR.... they use a newer technology called GPT (GUID Partition Table) to manage the hard drive structure. Older MBR systems have a limit of 4 Primary partitions, but there are some tricks to get more use by creating Extended and Logical Partitions inside one of the Primary partitions. GPT will allow up to 128 Primary partitions... far more useful, and this allows Wizard to achieve his multi-boot magic.
Trying to mix and match MBR and GPT systems often creates trouble, and I suspect that may be where you are right now. Your older motherboard should be using MBR. But somehow you have a 100 MB "boot partition".... and these are typically set up with GPT systems. You think your Windows boot files are in there, though I have doubts about that at the moment... Windows 7 does not usually setup that way.
Reading back in this thread, I don't see where you've told us which Linux you were trying to install... yet you are stuck at a grub rescue> prompt.... and Windows does not use grub. So I'm thinking you tried to install some Linux, and that it tried to install in UEFI mode (which it shouldn't have).... and the grub that Linux tried to setup is confused. (So am I, but I think it's getting better.
) Perhaps you were following some directions somewhere to install Linux and it directed you to manually create the
efi boot partition during the setup.... that might explain all of this, but it is just guessing on my part.
You've already tried "boot repair" options that failed you. So, back to the link that Wizard gave you above.... it may or may not work also, but you can try it (if you can follow the instructions... they are pretty complicated). Or you can come back to my suggestion of a total reinstall. You can start with reinstalling Windows, if you'd rather, and then move towards a dual-boot or multi-boot.... but Wizard will be able to guide you there much better, and especially recognizing the limitations you face with MBR.
Everything you do with dealing with hard drives and partitions presents more risk to you and the data you have on those two hard drives in your HP. If you have valuable data, I still suggest you remove those drives until you get a handle on what's going on so you don't end up losing anything important to you. I would not try to install Mint into the unallocated partition, as you mentioned.
As I also said before, I think I would move to the last page in your BIOS, where you usually see "Exit saving changes".... and from there I would "Reset factory defaults" on the BIOS, and then "Exit saving changes." You say it no longer boots on USB... but my BIOS does not have USB in the boot options, and I'm guessing that yours doesn't either. Instead, I have to hit ESC when booting to get the BIOS Boot Menu, and from there I can select a bootable USB if I have one plugged in. If you cannot boot on USB, then again, you may have more things out-of-whack that might be helped by resetting the BIOS back to its factory defaults.
Whew... my fingers are tired!!!
Cheers
