Unresponsive On Boot

I have a Toshiba Laptop that had a Dual Boot of Windows 7 and Linux Mint 17 on it and both OS's worked fine. I've been wanting to use CentOS 7 as my primary OS so that I can become more familar with RPM management and proceeded to remove my Mint installation and replace it with the CENTOS 7 installation, and the install completed successfully. HOWEVER, here's my problem.....

When my laptop starts up, I don't see GRUB nor do I have any option of selecting whether to run Windows or CentOS. It automatically loads up Centos 7. When I do a 'sudo fdisk -l', I can see that SDA1 is an NTFS drive, and when I try the following 'sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/Main\ Drive' I get an error message saying that I can't mount an NTFS drive.

Am I missing something or is there a way to access my Windows files from within Centos. I was able to do this with Mint without an issue, but unable to see any of my windows drives because I can't mount an NTFS drive.

I have no problem with keeping CENTOS as my only OS on this laptop, however, I do need to access the files from the Window's partition, and if anyone can help me to access my files, that would be totally awesome.

Thank you in advance for reading through this and for any help offered.....

Mikey

i have windows 8.1 and ubuntu 14.04 ....now wen i try to access a drive of windows in ubuntu it says failed to mount.
then i used "sudo ntfsfix /dev/sda4" for mounting the drives ......it worked for all drives except the E drive (not the system drive).
it gives error windows is hibernated , shutdown windows.
I shutdown my windows properly but still that particular drive refuses to mount..
any solns?

Did it again!

Last week, with help from this forum, I was able to install Linux Mint 17.1 dual boot with Windows 8.1. It worked so well, I decided to explore other Linux distros recommended by forum members as some I wanted to check out.

I was using Unetbootin to download and install these as live sessions on my Windows 8.1 partition.

On my last such download, something went wrong, and no doubt I caused the error, but no clue as to how.

When I opened up this PC, I got the normal dual boot option for Windows and Mint. When I selected Windows, I found an additional dual boot option between it and Unetbootin! Somehow I created a partition (?) on my C Drive for Unetbootin (see Thumbnail below).
This Unetbootin option only goes to a page for me to choose another OS. Further, when I rebooted, the Windows/Mint dual boot option no longer existed, just the Windows/Unetbootin one.

Been checking out various articles and websites about BCD/MBR repair, but nothing definitive (that I can understand) about modifying these to delete the Unetbootin partition and restoring the Windows/linux dual boot.

Naturally, this is a newbie land mine area, so I'm very reluctant to try anything I can't fully understand, which is the category everything I've Googled on this topic falls into.

Anyone know how I can resolve this short of a complete start over
installation based on steps that basically a PC fence post can follow?

TIA
Cheers!

Hello!

TL;DR: Deleted Linux partition from Windows. Stuck at Grub rescue prompt.

I'm sorry to trouble you guys, because I'm an idiot.

So I'm wanting to dual-boot Kalilinux and Windows 8.
I went through the steps such as creating a bootable USB, changing the
boot order and so on. I get into Kali, start Gparted and try to partition stuff.

I'm far from an expert, so I wasn't sure what to do. Long-story short, I
didn't seem to get Kali installed correctly, due to something with an EFI
drive being required. So I boot into windows and then stupidly, because it said in the guide,try to "uninstall" Kali by removing it's partition, inside Win8 haha... So I did.

Now I simply get the Grub rescue command prompt when I boot from the same
USB and I have no idea how to fix it. I've run bootrec.exe/fixmbr in Windows haha,
for what it's worth. However Grub can't find any partition it says.

In windows, I have like... 2-3 Recovery partitions. Does anyone know how to remove
them??? I've tried to clear as much as I can, besides the C drive and Auxillary D drive.

Any advice would be very appreciated.

I created a persistent USB thumb drive boot with LUKS for drive encryption (250 MB /boot and then 7.5 GB ext3 root). There's no swap partition because this is just to store some private files.

I want to make two or three copies of this thumb drive to store apart in case one gets destroyed/lost.

When I am booted from that thumb drive, can I plug in a same sized drive and just do a

Code:

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc

command to make a copy of itself to another thumb drive without booting to another host OS? This way when I make changes to one (such as to update the OS, apps, or data), I could then just copy the entire thumb drive over to the other two while still booted in the original USB.

Or would I effectively have to shut down, boot to my normal host OS (or other), and then copy the thumb drives when not booted into them.

I have windows 7 laptop, Dell. I downloaded the newest edition of Ubuntu (Twice)to see if it would install and dual boot beside Windows 7. Unsucessful on several attempts. Once I reboot the computer it will give ma a choice of 7 or Ubuntu. I decide on Ubuntu it starts to boot into Ubuntu than a black screen with all types of Kernel error codes that i'm unfamilur with. one is---(1.292618) kernel panic-not syncing: no working init found.

Try passing init option to Kernel (see Linux Documentation/init.txt for guidance..

I am not sure what all this means any help would be appreactiated...

Hi all:

Yes, my first post and I am sure to make mistakes. Here goes.

Regarding suggestions for Linux Screencasts forum. I constantly struggle with dual boot with Windows. I read so many blogs that my eyes cross. Its even more confusing now with UEFI partitions. It happened today and now Windows is not booting. Screencasts sound like a windfall.

What I need to know:

1. Exactly where are the dual boot files located?
2. Where are examples of working dual boot files?
3. What tools do I need to access dual boot files when my system is not working?
4. If I use Windows tools to fix Windows boot then Fedora boot is overwritten. What do I need to watch?
5. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.

There are my suggestions for today. Hope it generates food for thought. :-)

OK, I fixed the issue with the download. I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon "Rebecca" 17.1 on the computer. It said it was installed successfully, but when I rebooted all I got was a black screen with the cursor stuck in the upper left corner of the screen. I let it sit for a long time (maybe 45 minutes), did a control alt delete but nothing happened. I had to shut down the computer manually.

Hello All. This is my first post here. I am worse than a newbie; I'm a PC dinosaur! Not joking either.
Recently got a Dell Inspiron 3048 with Windows 8.1 pre installed. As I am a die hard XP user (my other PC is a Dell Dimension 2400), and seeing that PC's days may be numbered, I want to start using Linux, and decided Mint 17.1 would be first on the list.
Ordered a Linux Mint 17.1 boot disk and went to install it. At the option for a dual boot with Windows, I got lost, and did not understand the "other" choice versus making Linux the only OS on the PC. I wound up wiping my HDD and lost contact with Windows 8.1. Fortunately, the Dell Tech I got at Dell Support was able to walk me through getting Windows back up, but the only way I can now access Mint 17.1 is with the boot disk, but there is no set up options as it is already set up, even though incorrectly for a dual boot.
How do I wipe out Linux without losing Windows 8.1 as well so I can re install Linux and this time make the correct selection for a dual boot?
Anyone willing to respond please do so small and slow so I can follow.
TIA.
BTW, I have tried installing Zorin OS 9 Ultimate on my XP machine via DVD and USB, but I can't get past the f1/f2 loop, even though I have reconfigured my boot sequence according to the drive I'm installing from. Zorin support has been MIA on this. Anyone having a similar problem?
Cheers

Hey guys, so I just installed Ubuntu 12.04LTS on this netbook, almost everything works perfect except that I have to suspend and resume it when booting, it doesn't show splash screen or anything at boot.

I think this is a GRUB problem because before Ubuntu I had Android x86 installed alongside Windows 7 and the GRUB Android had installed worked just fine. The "suspend and resume" problem happens on both Ubuntu and Android.
Can someone please help me?