Hello good people of LQ, I am having a bootup issue with this Lenovo that I install mint on a while ago. My friend has been using it since September and has been having no issues with it until today. He told me last night he had an update and afterwards when he turned on the compute. He was greeted with this message upon boot:

error: attempt to read outside of disk hd0

I first did scans using the utilities in his BIOS/UEFI firmware to build up some knowledge of what could be wrong, but his computer passed all the scans with no problem. Afterwards I fiddled around a bit in grub to see how it behaved, and eventually did a boot-up from a USB into a live Linux distro.

Afterwards I shutoff the computer and got a new message different than the first one:

2100 dectection error on hdd0

And it wouldn't let me do anything other than wait for the blue screen.

This freaked me out because all I did was just see if I could boot-up from a USB into Linux and made no changes.

At any rate I configured it so at least he would be able to boot into bios to choose a USB to boot into and that worked.

I went back in through the USB live boot and checked his file system only to figure out that when I used parted to see his partitions his root file system was gone, or at least hidden.
I know he has at least 3 partitions
sda1-3, but it only shows 1 and 2 and not the root file system.
The two it does show have the flags set to hidden???

My goal is to make it so his Linux mint distro boots up as it normally did with his 3rd partition of sda being the root filesystem mounted at boot time.

I have used Linux for quite sometime, but I am not familiar with Lenovo Thinkpads and the common issues associated whit them. Help would be very much appreciated. Thank you!

Boot up a Live CD or USB of Linux Mint and as root post the output of fdisk -l. (small letter L)

Maybe somehow the root fs became unbootable/misconfigured:-

Are you getting a Grub rescue prompt?

Might be a bad mobo-
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPa...D/td-p/1588494

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPa...n/td-p/3287068

Hello everyone, Sorry for taking so long, here is the information I was able to get:


fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 24.0 GB, 24015495168 bytes
256 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2908 cylinders, total 46905264 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc96cac17


Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 4294967295 2147483647+ ee GPT

Disk /dev/sdb: 7742 MB, 7742685184 bytes
84 heads,
38 sectors/track, 4737 cylinders, total 15122432 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size
(minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000f2e77



Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 *
1 15122431 7561215+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdc: 7776 MB, 7776239616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 945 cylinders, total 15187968 sectors
Units = sectors
of
1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xa88d1e60


Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 2048 15187967 7592960 c W95 FAT32
(LBA)

uname -a

Linux mint 3.19.0-32-generic #37~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Thu Oct 22 09:41:40 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

sudo parted
GNU Parted 2.3
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted!
Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print

Model: ATA SAMSUNG MZMPA024 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 24.0GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number
Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 16.5GB 16.5GB Basic data partition hidden
2
16.5GB 24.0GB 7516MB Basic data partition hidden

(parted)

It sounds like the partition table got messed up. Try to find the lost partitions and put them back. I don't think the problem is distro, linux, or hardware related. It's just a fluke.

You can also try to analyze the partition table with which is GPT competent. I once saved a nonbooting laptop with it.

Looking at the output, sdb1 is the partition that's marked bootable.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/IBM7248-HOWTO/cfdisk.html
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

Grub might need to be re-install/repaired. This worked for me when Grub somehow got messed up.
https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/245