I was following this guide:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...h_Build_System

I was trying to upgrade from 3.3.5 to 3.3.6. *It worked correctly the first time*, except that when I rebooted, I noticed it was only showing one core. It's an Itel Core i3.

I determined the cause of this to be that I had overlooked a setting in the BIOS that disabled the other core, and hyper-threading. Just to be on the 'safe side", I went ahead and reran the compile, renaming it "linux-custom" so as not to be confused with the other one, which was named linux... and when I finished, a message appeared that "linux-custom" was in conflict with "linux". It asked me did I want to replace it?


Naturally I chose to do this, and reboot, although given the option, Id have preferred to have kept both. Upon rebooting, I realized I hadn't changed /boot/grub/menu.lst to boot "linux-custom", as I had for the one previous, but it was too late. Fingers crossed, (hoping that grub would allow me to manually type in what I was looking for) the screen flickered on, but nothing else happened.

I didnt get a POST. I waited and a faint screen in very small resolution appeared in the top portion of the screen, about 3 inches tall. It repeated across the top, and was completely unreadable... but I could make out that there were two options. When I pressed the arrows, a highlight would move between them.

I took this to be the grub menu asking which kernel to boot from, so I tried selecting each one, and neither worked. I decided that maybe I could boot from CD.


I put in the Arch install CD and hoped that it would boot from it, since i had the bios set to boot from cd first. It didnt; same illegible nonsense, in bad resolution.

I tried again, and this time I tried to select the boot menu by pressing f12. That didn't do anything either. I tried it a few times, holding it from the beginning and trying it after it was partially on.

I decided that I would give it no alternative; I removed the hard drive.
That time it booted straight from cd, but still bypassing the Toshiba logo screen, during POST. Del, f2 (enter setup), and f12 (boot options) do nothing. Ctrl+Alt+Del still works

But the resolution was fine, and it looked to working like it should from there.


It is no longer under warranty, but I do have another hard drive with the original windows 7 OS intact. I havent tried to put it in again.

I replaced it after it started getting some minor errors, in parted magic, because some friends had told me when I first bought the laptop that toshiba drives are notorious for failure, and as soon as the warranty was up to expect to start to see errors... Lo and behold... I wasn't going to wait around for it to die on me, at a more inconvenient time. I opted for one with twice as much space.

At the time, however, it would still boot and there was no noticeable problems with it. Ive tried to go into as much detail as possible, I hope it's not too much.

I want to repeat, though, that *I did get it to boot once with 3.3.6*, and after I enabled the other cores, it did reboot and /etc/procinfo I believe it is showed 2 cores. With hyperthreading however, I wasn't sure if that number should be 2 or 4. I wanted to reinstall the kernel to make sure.

Thanks for any help you can provide.