After performing a few software upgrades, including my kernel, I got a Grub Error 17. I use Linux Mint and at the time used Windows Vista. Both OS’s were installed on separate drives and, of course, I use Grub to select which to access. Now I’m not sure what caused the problem, but it happened randomly as far as I could tell. A quick search on the internet tells me this is because an “Invalid device requested”. The problem didn’t happen just the once either, it has happened a couple of times so that’s why I’m writing up my solution.
I tried looking on the internet for a solution and none of them worked. Most were pointing to something wrong in my BIOS, this wasn’t the case. I did in the end stumble upon This Post. Once I investigated this problem using this solution, I noticed that unlike in the article, my linux partition had changed from 83 (Linux) to 6 (fat16). Now I know what the problem was, it is relatively simple to fix:
- Firstly, you will need to boot into a live cd, I used my live Linux Mint CD.
- Secondly, once you’ve booted into your live cd, fire up a terminal and enter the following command. This is used to find out which is your linux partition:sudo fdisk -l
- You now need to select the disk that won’t boot correctly, in my case sdc:sudo fdisk /dev/sdc
- Now press “p” to list the partition table.
- Now press “t”, this command is used to tell fdisk you want to adjust the type of one of the partitions. It will ask you which partition you want to edit, and you should give it a number. My Linux partition is /dev/sdc1, so I entered 1.
- Now fdisk will ask for a hex code. This is where you need to enter 83 to represent a Linux device. If you’re unsure about this, you can type “L” to list all the operating system types it recognizes and their codes.
- Once your sure everything is correct, press “w” to write the changes to disk and exit.
- Finally you will need to reboot your machine, now everything should be working fine!