Won't boot

[Kansasman]

A friend has a Toshiba laptop, with Windows 7. He loaded Mint 8 and wanted to change the boot order. I told him to re-load the Mint partition with Mint 9 so we could just Menu>Control Center> System > Startup Manager. He loaded Mint 9 and can't boot ANY operating system.

Gets an error message
Grub error: unknown file system

and then:
GRUB rescue prompt

He doesn't really want to reformat and load Windows 7 again

Any help would be greatly appreciated (or just a point in the right direction)

[hatebreed]

You could boot up with the mint live cd and reinstall grub again. it should recheck all OSs and work correctly.

[Kloschüssel]

Looks like grub doesn't recognize the target filesystem of the OS you want to start.

It might be a wrong entry in grub menu (i.e. windows needs to be chainloaded; but grub usually sets this up correctly).

In the rescue prompt you should be able to detect the problem and fix it or at least start up a OS and fix it from there. You seem to have internet access, so this will be no problem of missing information.

First of all we need more information to help you.

* which grub are you using, grub or grub2?
* depending on the version of grub, please post /boot/grub/menu.lst or /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Until then you should find all you need here.

EDIT: try the other thing posted by hatebreed first. it is less work and if it does not help you can still do this.

[Kansasman]

SOLVED There are probably several ways to do this, but he ultimately put in the Windows 7 CD and fixed the boot record, with fixmbr I think. Thanks so much.