Linux Mint - Grub rescue - Unmounted partition?

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Running Linux Mint on a partitioned hard drive with XP. XP has not been run in a few months but it's there. Over the weekend, first I "lost" all of my desktop icons. Turned off and on no issue, everything's back. About 6 hours later I "lost" the background and the bottom menu / start bar. Went to turn off and back on and got this message once I had turned it back on:
"error: unknown filesystem.
Entering rescue mode ...
grub rescue> "

After some messing around and looking online, it looked to me as if the partition that mint is on was showing up as "unmounted". XP booted up fine but I could not get into Mint.

I'm wondering what might have caused this / if this is a common problem. After some tinkering, everything is working but I'm wondering if I need to be on the lookout for something or this was just a fluke.
 
what did you do to resolve the problem.

Might be hard drive on the way out, look at the output of commands like:

dmesg | less
tail -100 /var/log/syslog | less

to look for errors.

There might be a synthetic blend that can help your PC.
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Originally Posted By: krazy
what did you do to resolve the problem.

I turned to google
smile.gif
. Feel like I should say I'm not all the tech savvy, particularly when it comes to Linux.

Best I can recall - loaded Mint via a flash drive. I attempted to use Boot Repair. First time, I ended up restoring the automatic boot to XP. Okay - not what I wanted so I found some posts that indicated using Gparted to determine the correct partition and assumed that is where I went wrong. re-ran Boot repair, restarted, no boot to anything. At this point I was pretty concerned I royally messed something up.

Realized when I was looking at the partitions in Gparted the Mint partition was coming up as unmounted (I think that is the word that was used).

Found this post online:
http://linuxexpresso.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/repair-a-broken-ext4-superblock-in-ubuntu/

and followed it. Then went into Mint via the flash drive and used Boot Repair to direct to the right partition. Restarted the final time and was all set.

I thought just that one partition unmounted was odd, as all the other partitions were showing without any issue indicated.
 
My first guess would be something went wonky on the hard drive. So, ensure your necessary stuff is backed up in case this happens again. I've used the SuperGrub rescue disk in the past, too, for the odd occasion when Windows decides to monkey around.
 
Yeah, check the SMART data for bad blocks. I think there's a GUI tool for doing so, otherwise run 'sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda' (or whatever drive you want to check).

I had all kinds of weird things go wrong on my Mint laptop last year when the hard drive began to fail. Fortunately I quickly spotted the ever-increasing bad block counter in the SMART output, and was able to copy all the important stuff off before it died.
 
My (very uneducated) guess - seems like it's probably the hard drive as you guys said. Happened again earlier, hard restart eventually yielded bootup from hard drive but quickly reverted to the same issues noted in the OP. Enough time to transfer a couple of files to a flash drive that I changed since the last backup.

Hard to complain after a little over 9 years of running. Screen, disk drive and battery all quit to 5 years ago.

Next up is an old Asus eeePC carrying XP, and will get Mint soon. Thanks for the help!
 
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