Thanks for replying rusty, I got it fixed and am now back to normal

Followed the instructuions in the testdisk link and it seems that all the partitions can be successfully recognized.. there's no corrupt partitions or anything, so I thought maybe its just the GRUB.. Anyway, i took a peek into the first partition (DELL utilities) and saw some KNOPPIX files there (there's the KNOPPIX folder at least), not sure if its safe to delete it so I left it there for the time being, quit from testdisk without writing, and tried the steps to fix GRUB i found from another site:

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopi...=61209#p350653

basically, what I did was (who know this might help other ppl):
boot with Live Mint CD, mount the harddisk install Mint partition, obtain its UUID (via sudo blkid), then run (sudo grub-setup -d /media/PUT_UUID_HERE/boot/grub /dev/sda), and reboot and run (sudo update-grub) afterwards to tidy the GRUB up. It worked like a charm

Oh by the way, stay away from "PowerLogic Zen III LZ" (if anybody ever see them) mouse! It is smooth very high dpi but also very very light in terms of physical weight, and this makes it very unstable prone to nudges and shakes.. its possibly catastrophic to use something like that.. high dpi isnt everything.. I've learned my lesson LOL

niM_xaM