The laptop is an old Toshiba Qosmio F20-137.

The thing is I deleted the partitions on the hard drive with fdisk during an aborted installation of Slackware.

The laptop power key is broken but for some reason I can turn it on by pushing any of the buttons alongside the power button. I then have to immediately enter a password to boot the laptop, this is set in the BIOS. It then boots from LILO for about 4 seconds, panics and halts. I then have to pull the battery out to stop it. I always install LILO to the MBR when I do an installation so I'm guessing it's still there from the previous install (it had 14.1 on it).

I've tried hitting F2, F1 and ESC repeatedly but can't get into the BIOS. It just asks for the password then boots up. F12 doesn't work either, so I can't change the boot order that way.

There are no prompts that appear on the screen at all apart from the one that says "PASSWORD:".

Is there any way I can persuade it to boot from the CD drive?

Erase Lilo from hard drive, it may default to BIOS setup if it cannot find a bootable drive.

Before you immediately have to enter the password you may have to hit the delete or one of the F keys -- in other words start stabbing one of them like you're playing a 1980's "athletics" game then power it on while you continue to do so.
Better advice may be had from the manufacturer but it sounds like you're not hitting the right button quick enough.

Have a look at this support document. It may help you access the BIOS.

-->http://support.toshiba.com/support/v...il?soid=627009

This is the method that is most likely to work. It sounds like you have a power on password set in the BIOS. I don't own one of these, just found the instructions by a search.

Best of luck.

My T420 sometimes skips letting me in the BIOS so I have to retry, normally holding down (or frantically pushing) one of mentioned keys directly at power-on...

No, sorry guys, none of this works.

It asks for a password then immediately runs lilo and boots.

None of the keys or sequences have any effect whatsoever. I can't access the drive so I can't delete LILO.

Thanks for your suggestions though. I guess it's bricked.

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Assuming you have pressed all the key combinations and ideas then, it seems, your laptop is faulty goods but failing returning it as such you could try looking for the location of the BIOS battery and reset terminals and trying that.
I am very surprised that without a modern UEFI system BIOS can be "bricked".

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I will do that, thank you and report back.

Good idea 273: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...so-4175572802/


My first thought was removing the hard drive and using external adapters or another laptop.

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I would remove the hard disk, assuming that then you will be able to access the BIOS menu and set it to boot off a removable device (CD/DVD or USB stick).

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I had an older laptop that wouldn't boot off the CD/DVD if the hard disk drive was not physically installed. Just something to consider if you can't boot off of the CD/DVD when there is no disk in the laptop.

To erase the LILO boot loader ...
If you connect your hard drive to another computer and zero out the first section of the drive, that would erase LILO. You could then then re-insert the drive into the laptop.

Something like the following will zero out the first part of the drive.
Where (disk drive) is something like /dev/sda or /dev/sdb.

Caution dd is a dangerous command. I would plug the laptop drive into a machine without any other disk connected (except the one you want to erase/zero), then boot from any Slackware installation disk to run the dd command.

This assumes you have another computer available and are comfortable removing the disk drive from your laptop.

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Thanks all.

I'm going to try removing the CMOS battery over the weekend see if that helps. I've also been offered the loan of a HD caddy to erase the drive.

I shall report back next week.

So, I did finally solve this.

I opened it up and unplugged the hard drive and then booted up. It complained about a hdd error and dropped in to the BIOS. I changed the boot order to start from the DVD, switched off, plugged the HD back in then booted with a Slackware install DVD running, it still refused to boot from the DVD.

I unplugged the HD again and booted. This time it booted from the install DVD. I ejected the DVD when it got to the first bit where you choose a kernel then flipped it over and plugged in the HD without shutting down. Pushed the DVD back in and let it run. It picked up exactly where it had left off and a normal install followed.

Thanks to all who took the time to reply and offer suggestions. Sorry for the delay.

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