I recently purchased a new Lenovo Thinkpad T420i and am having problems installing the latest version of Squeeze from CD. After receiving the laptop, I started it up, configured Windows 7, and confirmed everything is working correctly. Next I went through the Debian installer, which completed successfully. I'll be dual-booting Windows 7 and Debian, so at the partitioning stage I resized my NTFS partition, added a shared VFAT partition, then used the "Guided" install to create my root and swap partitions. My partition layout is:

/dev/sda1 NTFS, primary (small, not sure what Windows uses this for)
/dev/sda2 NTFS, primary (the main Windows one I resized)
/dev/sda3 NTFS, primary (the Lenovo recovery partition at the end of the drive)
/dev/sda4 extended
/dev/sda5 FAT32, logical (shared between Windows and Linux)
/dev/sda6 Linux, logical, bootable (Linux root)
/dev/sda7 Linux swap, logical

During the boot loader phase, I chose the default (install grub to MBR). After the installation completed successfully and I rebooted, I get:

which I see means the drive could not be booted. It then drops me back to a Boot Menu where I can select which device to boot, and choosing my hard drive goes to a black screen for a few seconds, then kicks me back to the Boot Menu.

I assumed something was wrong with grub, so I booted the CD into rescue mode and chose to reinstall grub onto the Master Boot Record. But nothing changed. Just to experiment, I went into fdisk, deleted all my new partitions (leaving just the Windows ones), and tried rebooting, but the same error happened. I then went through the Debian installer again, being careful to set everything up correctly, but still, the device won't boot.

I'm not even getting to the grub boot screen, so something is wrong even before the point. Reinstalling grub to the Master Boot Record (grub-install /dev/sda) isn't changing anything. How can I troubleshoot this?

Thanks in advance.

Ehmm...is'nt that the network boot? This does not have anything to do with the harddrive, I think...

I'd check the BIOS boot prefs. See that the harddrive is in the sequence.

Then, try to boot from a Live CD, or TTY Linux, mount the drive and analise the menu.lst in the Grub folder...

But, the above as far as I know/guess is the NIC trying to find a PXE record over the network...

Luck!

Thor
EDIT :
Hmm, did you move this? Are you sure there is no overlap in partitions? You seem to have "squeezed" (sorry for the word, the Distro is ... Squeeze?) Linux "in there"...
If possible, try to check the partition layout...

First, to get back to a working state, re-install the Win-7 bootloader. Start the rescue disc (of Win-7) and completely re-install it. (being new there's not much data on it I suppose). Then use the Win-7 rescue disk to resize the partitions (NTFS is best modified with native M$ tools). Install Debian again.

It's not the network boot, it's the generic message saying it can't boot the selected device. After it fails it takes you to a list of boot options (cd, hdd, or network). Choosing hdd takes me to a black screen and bounces back to the boot menu. Choosing cd boots to the cd as expected. I've looked at the grub config and everything looks correct, but it's not even getting to grub in the first place. I didn't move the NTFS partition at all and there's no overlap, I simply resized the partition using the Debian installer and repartitioned the newly-created free space.

They didn't ship the laptop with a Windows 7 rescue disk, so I assume I'd have to call and request that to get it. I have followed the same steps to resize and repartition from the Debian installer on another system and everything worked fine, and I believe their install guide said Debian's partitioning tools generally work better than Windows' at resizing and moving NTFS partitions. Doing it as Dutch Master suggested is an option, but I don't think that's the root issue (apparently the MBR is messed up so that it won't even get to the grub screen, which shouldn't have anything to do with the NTFS partition).

After digging some more, I realized that after the install, /dev/sda6 was marked bootable but /dev/sda2 was not. I used fdisk to make /dev/sda2 bootable and grub (and Windows and Linux) came up fine. I emailed the debian-users list in case this should be reported against the Debian installer (as I believe it was the installer defaults that made one bootable and the other not).

By what I've seen here, you'll have some partitioning to do.

There can be four primary partitions, or for example, three primary partitions with one extended partition which can have a lot logical partitions.

The thing is that bootable partition should be primary partition, and since you want a dual boot system it is advisable to install the bootloader on the MBR.

So, to make things simple, delete extended partition you have now and create new primary partition and install Debian on it.

After the installation run;

Everything is working fine now as is, and AFAIK the Linux bootable partition doesn't need to be on a primary one (Windows takes up 3 already, and you need at least 2 for Linux, including swap).

So, it fixed itself magically? One should post what solved the problem so that others can benefit from it, otherwise this thread won't make much sense.

You don't need swap.

See my post with the solution above: