I have run Windows for years and Windows XP for about 3 years. My "large" 80gb drive has gotten very small so I started to look for info on upgrades and cleaning up XP, when I came across and article on Ubuntu. It peaked my interest so I have tried many Live Distro CD's and Found Slax for a USB and Just loaded Mint 6 onto another USB. I like them and have No Problems using Linux. My family though is Stuck on XP so I got a 250gb SATA drive and installed my XP on that. When that was loaded and Updated I booted Mint on usb and Transferred Documents and Settings folders from the Old XP drive to the New XP drive. I shutdown Mint and removed the USB drive, now when trying to boot the New XP drive I get a grub 21 error. Any ideas why? I didn't install Mint 6 on any drives.
Thanks

I'm a little confused about your current setup. Do you still have the 80GB drive attached? Separate USB drives for Slax and Mint plus the 250GB drive? It would seem your stage1 file from Grub is on the first drive (250GB??) and looking for the rest of its files on the USB drive with Mint that you removed, but it's hard to know.

Simplest thing to do is to attach all drives and boot Mint and run command as root: sudo fdisk -l (lower case letter L)

and post the output here which will tell us your drive/partition info.

I still have the 80gb IDE drive with older install of XP and a 120gb IDE for Storage, the 250gb SATA with the new install of XP and a 500gb Freeagent usb Drive for Media. The Linux Slax and Mint are on two Seperate USB flash drives. MOBO is MSI 7032 with AMD 64 3000+ 1.5gb Memory. I will run the sudo fdisk later when I get home. Thanks.

The most likely scenario is that when you installed Mint or Slax on the USB the stage1 file of Grub installed to the internal drive set first in boot priority in the BIOS.

In addition to the fdisk -l output, while logged in as root user run the following command from grub. Type grub at the command prompt to get the grub prompt (grub>) and enter consecutively:

geometry (hd0)
geometry (hd1)
etc..for however many drives attached. Grub counts from zero. Post output.

mint@mint ~ $ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000a6e56

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 30401 244196001 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x82618261

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 9728 78140128+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdc: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x025d025c

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 14592 117210208+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdd: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0002cacc

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 * 1 60801 488384001 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sde: 8054 MB, 8054636032 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 979 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00054fa1

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sde1 * 1 979 7863786 b W95 FAT32
mint@mint ~ $

When booting from the first on the list - /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes - is the new Windows XP drive that I get the Error 21 and aslo 17 when /dev/sde which has the Mint loaded on it. /dev/sdb: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes has the old load of XP. /dev/sdc: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes and /dev/sdd: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes are just extra storage. Thanks

You have five drives. All five of them are using windows filesystems??
You are booting with Grub which is a Linux bootloader. Obviously, Grub is not on any of the first four (ntfs) drives. The drive you have Mint installed on is a FAT32 (windows) filesystem. I've never tried installing Linux on a windows filesystem. I've read that it is possible but probably won't work very well.

The default installation for Linux Mint is to install Grub stage1 to the mbr of the first drive in boot priority, that would be sda in your case. When you are installing the bootloader with Mint, you need to click on the 'Advanced' tab of the bootloader install window to get the option to NOT install to mbr of first disk.

Are you able to boot anything? Do you have SuperGrubDisk to try booting? What are your plans for the system? Do you not expect to have the USB drive with Mint attached regularly? If that's the case, you will need to change the method you use to boot. All your other drives/partitions are windows so you could try fixing your windows boot and adding a boot entry for Mint. Post back with your intentions.

My plan for the system was to finalize the loading of XP to the 250gb drive and transfer docs and setting files to that drive from the 80gb xp drive then once that was complete I was going to reformat the 80gb drive and install a permanent distro of linux for my use while my family continued to use the XP. I also will continue to try different live Distros and also use Slax and Mint with persistent booting. The 80gb, 120gb and the 250gb are all internal drives. I am able to choose the drive I want to boot, including usb drives plugged into ports on the Motherboard, at startup by pressing F11. I booted in Mint this morning and looked at the boot.ini on both XP drives and found them to be OK. What is weird is that I believe I was still able to boot the second install of XP until I transferred docs and settings folders to the new XP install. I copied and pasted to do the transfer. Though that shouldn't really matter because those folders are not accessed until after XP has started to load. What I am going to try over the weekend is to do a soft reinstall of XP because of what you stated: "The default installation for Linux Mint is to install Grub stage1 to the mbr of the first drive in boot priority, that would be sda in your case. When you are installing the bootloader with Mint, you need to click on the 'Advanced' tab of the bootloader install window to get the option to NOT install to mbr of first disk." which I don't remember seeing, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there. I used the instructions from http://www.pendrivelinux.com/usb-lin...ation-windows/ to install Mint to the sandisk Cruizer 8gb flash drive. Thank you again I'm learning.

I know the Advanced Tab is there for Linux Mint bootloader installation because I just installed Mint a few weeks ago. I stopped the installation because there was no obvious option to not install to mbr. I noticed the Advanced Tab, clicked and there it was! Got distracted and didn't do the install until the next day and of course, forgot about it and ended up with Linux Mint bootloader.


To boot xp again, these are the instructions I have found:

use xp cd, enter "R" (for recovery?) in setup, select xp from list, enter password, enter FIXMBR, if that doesn't work enter "FIXBOOT"

I guess I'm assuming you are not able to boot your original xp, but reading over your last post again, not sure??

I did recover the master boot per your instructions. Thank you for your help.