[CS-FSLUG] Strange boot problem

[davidm at hisfeet.net]

I'm having a strange problem with boot-up. I have three hard disks on the
system, and have been able to boot from any one of the three in time past.
It's a 64  bit system, but I have not used 64bit OSs on it before. Then I
recently installed mint17 64bit. it installed properly, and worked just
fine.  But I had several older OSs installed, and decided to eliminate
them by reformatting the partitions where they resided.  Then I went back
to Linux 17 64bit, and ran grub-install /dev/sdb (because that is the
drive where said OS resides), and also grub-install /dev/sda, since that
is the drive I normally boot from, and it is the drive marked as the
'boot' drive.

I had eliminated all but two of my OSs: mint13 32bit, and mint 17 64.bit.

Then went for a reboot, and got an error (apparently from Bios) that
indicated a boot error, and ask me to insert a boot disk and reboot. I
tried several things.  It would boot from a live cd, or DVD, and I know it
is possible to "chroot" into the OS in any particular partition, but that
is unhandy as a regular practice.

I discovered that PlopLinux allows me to "boot from hard drive", and that
choice takes me to the grub menu on whichever drive I have set in Bios to
boot from.

among the remedies I have tried without success: running grub-install from
each of the installed OSs; using gparted to rewrite the boot sector; and
installing a third OS (RoboLinux 64bit)

I understand that the boot sector is ordinarily copied to varios parts of
the hard drive, but have not been able to discover where. Is it possible
to copy them from those locations to the boot sector? and if so: first,
how do I find them, and second how do I copy them precisely to the boot
sector?  Or is there a better method?



So that's how I'm booting. Obviously the partition table is intact.
gparted shos no errors.