Posted on 11/18/2013 5:19:19 AM PST by raybbr
Hello to all you techies, geeks and lurkers.
I've got an older Lenovo laptop (3000 N100) that crashed for the second time in a month. It was definitely software related. Had W-XP preloaded by Lenovo. It's been running slow lately so I thought this would be a good time to Linux on it.
My sons use it for home schooling. I don't need it to do much other than surf the web and play some flash videos.
Lenovo has this thing called Lenovo Care that is installed on the LT. Does anyone know where this resides? I can't find anything in the BIOS and it still comes up without a hard drive installed.
What happened is the Lenovo Care (LC) function would come up and the LT would keep rebooting.
I put the recovery discs in and it starts the process but I would really like to get rid of LC and use the LT without it using Mint if I can. When the original disks get to a certain point it comes up with a fault. I can't remember what it is but it stops the process. I believe it has to do with hardware and the fact that the original DVD is not in there.
I pulled the hard drive out and reformatted to NTFS on another LT. It's and 80G that shows 74.5G available after formatting. I've run several tests on the HD and all come up good.
I have no internal DVD drive. I am using an external drive and the BIOS sees it and connects okay.
I put the HD into the Lenovo and boot. The screen comes up saying "No operating system found". Okay, I put an XP disc in and it tries to boot. It still shows no operating system. I tried the Linux Mint disc - same result.
I think the problem is with the LC. It still shows up during the boot process. Is it possible that it resides in some hardware and is the default boot. I can't find very much on Lenovo's site about the inner workings of LC.
I now have a LT that is working okay other than an OS. All the hardware seems to be doing its job but I can't get an OS on it.
Any help would be appreciated.
NO. I've looked all over the web (well parts of it) and can't find anything related.
True, could be the RAM.
shows RAM is okay...?
does it show how MUCH working RAM you have?
If you have an external DVD drive you may have to choose “USB” in the boot order rather than “DVD”.
My netbook wouldn’t boot - turns out one of the sticks of RAM I upgraded with went bad. Removed the bad RAM and it booted fine. Try it.
When you burnt the ISO for Mint to a DVD, did you copy the file? Or let your burning software burn the image inside the ISO?
If you just have the ISO file on the disk, there’d be nothing there to mount.
I had trouble with a Dell laptop — hd glitches.
I finally bought a new hd.
When I originally started up the laptop, I made the Dell emergency image disks. I used those to image the new hd.
It worked okay.
I then, restored a more recent image with my software programs, etc.
==
Initially, using the restore disk took a while.
Are you sure yours quit? Does it actually give you an error message on screen? If not, it may just be restoring some large images to the HD. Let it run a while — it make take an hour or more.
My restore formatted as it went, so the first of 3 disks took a long while.
Yes. I'm not a beginner, you know! :^)
This idea has a lot of promise. Have you tried it yet?
Been there. Done that.
It may be the LT is toast. But. I have this aversion to tossing something like this when there is a chance I can revive it. It all points to something resident in the Lenovo Care to me. BIOS recognizes both the HDD and the USB DVD and "sees" their names. I have the boot sequence set for USB and I can also hit F12 and choose it there when booting.
Didn’t mean to imply you were, but... Even experienced folks can over look things.
So... Next blindingly obvious question... Does the Mint disk boot on your other machine? ;-)
Also, check the external drive. Make sure it really is a DVD drive and not just a CD. I’ve run into that one before.
If you have a decent sized USB flash drive, just make a bootable version of your Mint ISO.
It's okay. I was just funnin'.
So... Next blindingly obvious question... Does the Mint disk boot on your other machine? ;-)
Didn't try that. Will do so.
Posting from Mint on my other machine. Seems kind of cool. Will possible set this one up for dual boot.
If you don’t care about what’s on the disk, go on your working computer and Google “Ultimate Boot CD.” Download the installer to put it on a USB thumb drive. Install it on a USB drive, and boot off of it on the laptop.
You’ll have a series of options in a text menu. Arrow down to ‘HDD’ and use one of the drive wiping utilities to completely wipe out the disk, essentially setting it back to default. Once you have a clean disk, download your preferred flavor of Linux (I’m an Ubuntu fan myself), and get the “LiveCD” version to put on a USB drive. Boot off of that USB disk and start your installation, and you’re off to the races.
Interdasting...
You could try some of these suggestions...
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=107675
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/X230-Booting-from-USB-problem/td-p/936473
Mint is kind of nice. I also have a machine running Ubuntu 13.04 and another running Cent OS6. Production servers running either RHEL or NetBSD.
Cent seems the most “functional” for some of the bashing around I do. Ubuntu’s insistence upon Unity is still aggravating.
Fedora is kind of pretty, but doesn’t seem to have the straight up functionality that Cent has.
I use an old version of Linux Puppy to just go in and peek around. Used it a couple of times to recover documents and precious photos.
Some of those old win9x era laptops REQUIRED a utility partition - Part of the Bios actually lives on the HDD. Dunno if your Levono/IBM does or not, but an 80g drive would put the machine back far enough to be close to those shenanigans. Perhaps that is where ‘Levono Care’ used to reside. If that is the case, That would explain why the HDD checks out fine, but isn’t bootable... The BIOS is trying to hand off to the utility PART, which then hands off to the boot manager.
If that is the case, the machine requires a custom Master Boot Record and utility partition, usually installed by a ‘HDD prep utility’. Repair at this point would be to zero out the drive, obtain the ‘HDD Prep utility’, get it on a bootable media, boot it in the machine and run it.
THEN, DO NOT let ‘nix install the boot manager to the MBR (as normal), but rather, to the same partition as you install ‘nix to (same deal as if you were setting it up for multiboot and not using grub as the boot manager). Custom installation should have the option.
If that is the case, the machine requires a custom Master Boot Record and utility partition, usually installed by a ‘HDD prep utility’. Repair at this point would be to zero out the drive, obtain the ‘HDD Prep utility’, get it on a bootable media, boot it in the machine and run it.
I'm pretty sure that's the case. After a deep level format on a windows machine there is still less than 80G available. Where would I find the "prep utility"?
I have a repair and recover disk from Lenovo - it doesn't work either.
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