I'm having trouble with my computer not booting and was wondering if someone would be able to help. I have a laptop that was working fine yesterday morning: Acer Aspire5742z 64 bit. I partitioned the hard drive and installed Windows 7 in the first partition and Linux in 3 other partitions: / /home and swap. After I installed Windows everything seemed ok and I did some updates and shut things down. I latter installed CrunchBang Waldorf. The Linux install didn't go well: I couldn't use any of the menu to access anything in CrunchBang, all I got was "failed to execute child process (input/output error). I rebooted and the computer died. I can't boot into either OS, I can't even boot the System Recovery CD that I have.

I'm hoping someone will have some incite into this. I don't know how much is hardware or software related. I installed Grub in the MBR. I don't know if that would cause the problem.


Thanks for any help.

There are normally no issues with Grub in the MBR.

You say you can't boot the recovery CD.

Have you tried booting the Crunchbang install disc or some Live CD or other?

Can you boot at all, even if it's just through the power-on-self-check (POST)? If so, where does booting fail and what messages do you get?

If not, I would have to say it smells like a hardware problem.

I finally got the laptop to boot with the System Rescue CD; don't know why it wouldn't do that before. I still can't get either OS to boot. I'll have to figure out how to boot them with the Rescue CD, maybe that will help. I did a check on the Linux partitionI can't get to the boot menu at this point.
When I try to boot up into the boot menu I get this message:
I downloaded the bios from Acer. Do you think that would be the problem?

Somehow your boot priority has pxe set as 1st boot device in Bios.

This thread might help. It cites the same series of error messages. Sadly, it ends with a failed hard drive.

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000706.htm

Try booting with a Live CD of something and running S.M.A.R.T. tools on the HDD.

I figured out how to boot with the System Rescue CD and was able to boot up the Linux partition with CrunchBang, but not windows. CrunchBang seems to be working ok now, so I would think the hard drive is ok. Also able to get to the bios. I still can't boot up either OS with grub, so am thinking grub must have been installed wrong. I installed it in the MBR. I searched around and found a site and tried this:
grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/custom /dev/sda

I got this message:
Isn't this command to install grub in the MBR? What does this message about the bios mean. I couldn't find anything in the bios about drives except IDE1 AND IDE2

The sata mode was set to AHCI, the other choice was IDE.

Thanks

If you're booting linux from rescue cd/usb unmount it & remove it as you don't need it.
This command is for rescue or chroot I believe
You can either do
or install grub thru synaptic package manager