Hey everyone! My past experience with Linux has been fairly limited (using live distros for specific tasks), but decided to quit dabbling and dive right in when I purchased a new laptop a couple of months ago, The laptop is a Lenovo B570 (SB core i3, 8 GB ram, Intel HD 3000 gfx) with an OCZ Agility 3 120 GB SSD in the main drive bay and the 320 GB WD Caviar Blue HDD that came with the computer in an optical caddy (both disks are connected via sata III). The SSD is a triple boot steup: Windows 7 (came with the computer ::shrug::), OS X Lion (my semi-primary OS), and Linux Mint 12. Persuading all of the OSs and their respective bootloaders to reside harmoniously on the drive was quite a task. I have a Hackintosh / Win 7 home-build tower, so those two were easy... Linux and grub2 not so much. After a number of reinstalls, I decided to ditch Ubuntu 11.10 and check out Mint... loved it and everything (pretty much) worked!

My main bootloader is Chameleon which chainloads grub2 (installed on the / partition) -> Mint. For the OS installs I pre-partioned the SSD and installed everything without the optical caddy HDD inserted. When all OSs were booting ok, I put the HDD back in, and formatted it NTFS (for shared storage/symlinks) with a GParted Live USB, then retested each OS. Win 7 and OS X = no problem. Mint, however, just doesn't like that disk and will not boot with it present! Specifically, I get to the grub menu, select Mint 12, then blank screen, totally frozen. As I hadn't put anything on the HDD yet, I've tried quite a few things: using various different reformats, booting with the drive wiped and unallocated, installing other Linux distros with or without grub in the MBR of the HDD, adding it to fstab w/ UUID, last night upgraded to the latest Liquorix kernel to see if that would make a difference... it didn't. Same blank screen results trying to boot into recovery mode. I can boot into my install without the disk, then hotplug and mount it no problem though. Further confusing the issue is that I did have one successful boot with the disk inserted: I formatted it NTFS with GParted in my Mint install. I then used Windows a bit later and tried to boot Mint again... blank screen.

I've been scouring the forums for a couple of weeks trying to figure out what I can do and have learned quite a few things! However the solution to this problem is not among them I know that my configuration is rather "unorthodox" but I would appreciate it greatly if anyone can help shed some light on this for me! Below is my bootinfo script (current have Lubuntu installed on the HDD w/ grub2 in the MBR of the disk)... sdc is a flash drive made w/ pendrive linux, currently booted from Mint live on that.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------## DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE## It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates# from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub#

### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom #### This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the# menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change# the 'exec tail' line above.### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ###

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------# /etc/fstab: static file system information.## Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).## <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 # / was on /dev/sda3 during installationUUID=e3bd70ed-c3fd-4eea-a9cf-7576269c369a / ext4 noatime,discard,errors=remount-ro,user_xattr 0 1 tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777, 0 0

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------## DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE## It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates# from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub#

### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom #### This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the# menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change# the 'exec tail' line above.### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ###

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------# /etc/fstab: static file system information.## Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).## <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0# / was on /dev/sdb1 during installationUUID=c01a115f-d7d9-4f15-9815-9769386099fb / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1# swap was on /dev/sdb2 during installationUUID=d0727e4f-2d9b-4512-96cc-3e5625cf5f9b none swap sw 0 0--------------------------------------------------------------------------------