Why won't my PC boot into either the installation or a live CD?
 

Hello,

I am new Vector Linux but not Linux. Last night I installed Vector Linux Light on my laptop. The install seemed to go fine and when I went to reboot post installation (without the CD in my CDROM) it doesn't boot to anything. I rebooted it a couple of times and after the BIOS/logo nothing seems to happen. I can't even boot to a live CD like Puppy Linux or even the Vector install CD, I keep ending up looking at a cursor on a blank screen. I have installed many distros, and even had installations fail and never had this happen. I took the defaults for installing LILO, does anyone have any idea how I can fix this? The Laptop is a fairly new Lenovo Ideapad y430 laptop. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike

If the bios is set to boot from cd and then no bootable cd is loading, it could be some bios level problem.

you sure you have set up bios correctly ?

I don't think its a BIOS issue, my boot priority on my BIOS is set to boot the DVDROM first then the hard drive. I have tried booting to the CD and even going to the boot options and selecting the DVDROM and no luck then I did the opposite, manually selecting the Hard Drive on boot and no luck.

So your machine wont boot via cd or via hdd now after your newly installed distro? Strange.

Firstly I'd do what you've done, remove install media from cdrom and reboot. See what you get, got any grub / bootloader errors? Anything?

If not you can be sure that your hdd install is screwed. Maybe the bootloader didn't install properly, obviously this wont boot your OS. Try booting another distro, like perhaps an ubuntu live cd, see if that will boot.

If it doesn't, pop a distro live cd image on a usb drive, and if your bios supports it try and boot from this usb drive, possibilities with your cd drive not read/writing cd's correctly hence not writing files properly to your hdd.

If your on a network try a network installation by NFS. There's plenty of tutorials online how to do this and it's fairly straight forward, providing you can get a live cd to boot :).

If you have another computer, see if your boot cd/dvd is able to boot other computer.

I would unplug your machine. If you are using a laptop, I would unplug the laptop and then remove the battery. Wait 7 whole seconds. Then plug the power cord back. Don't worry about batteries for now. Now turn now your system and go straight to the bios menu. Make sure your boot order is setup to boot the cd/dvd followed by the hard drive. See if your cd/dvd is now able to boot your system. If your cd/dvd is able to boot, I would now check if the hard drive is able to boot. If the hard drive isn't able to boot, I would use a rescue cd/dvd to see if reinstalling the bootloader might solve your problem.

I've had weird booting issues with my toshiba laptop, and unplugging the power and batteries seem to resolve them.

Thanks btncix, I will try removing the battery when I get home from work. I have literally tried dozens of installs on this machine and never had anything like this happen before.

Well removing the battery didn't help. The DVD drive sounds like it is spinning but no luck still. Strangest thing can't boot a live CD, maybe I bricked it. I'm not sure what else to do, maybe try a PC repair place.

please try your cd in another computer and see if its booting

I did, I have tried four different CDs, Puppy Linux 4.3, openSUSE 11.1, Vector Linux Light, and Slackware 13.

Hm, maybe an obvious one but have you tried loading optimal defaults in the bios?

Well I went into my BIOS setup and loaded the defaults, still ended up with the same results.

Oh man, hmpf im really having trouble with this one!.

Your machine is literally not booting at all? No messages, just a black screen? I really would advise against passing it to a pc repair place. They're overpriced and im sure you can fix it yourself.

I know we cant seem to fix the issue but i refuse to admit it's screwed!.

Do you get the same output on your screen regardless of attempting to boot from cd or hdd?

If you've tried setting bios to boot from cd and hdd and still fails it'd be a hardware(most probably bios) fault.
Try reflashing your bios

Man, I empathize.

I agree with Jerry, but one more thing you might want to try is, poweroff, disconnect your hard drive, and try to boot with CD.


I had a really weird experience once where a flawed monitor wouldn't let me boot. Really really weird. I thought for sure, something was wrong with my motherboard or hard drive. Long story short, when I switch to a different monitor, everything booted up fine.


BoydRice, I doubt you're in similar situation.

Have you checked to cables to the CD drive/motherboard?

@JamesChamberlin no, I don't get any messages just a blinking cursor. I get the blinking cursor whether I try booting the hd or the cd.

@j_jerry I have never reflashed my bios so I'll have to look into that.

@btncix I don't have a monitor here to try that with but I might try that this weekend.

@yaneck no I haven't tried that yet, I haven't really opened up my laptop like that before, then again I just got it in May.

First off thank you to everyone that has provided suggestions I appreciate it. I think this weekend I am going to buy a flash drive load a linux distro on it and try and boot from a flash drive see if that helps. If that doesn't work then I am going to look into those sugestions.

Thanks

before you buy a flash-disk make sure your pc supports booting from usb

good_luck

j_jerry

Just curious, what laptop model are you working with?

Man, I hope it all works out. LOL, I bet you're ready to beat your computer with a bat.

I had the same problem...

I installed linux as a dual-boot with Windows XP and the laptop would not boot. It would POST then show a blinking dash at the upper left of a dark screen.

I could get it to boot by pressing the start button twice, then waiting a bit before pressing start again. I assume it was some fluke of the BIOS.

You might try the procedure I described and if it that has no effect, try removing the battery, disconnection the power, then pressing start twice and waiting some time.

If that does not have any effect, see if you can clear the BIOS by resetting a jumper on the motherboard. Some laptops let this be done. Look at the documentation of your laptop and try google for information.

@btncix: I have a Lenovo y430 Ideapad Laptop I got in May this year, I am going to check my warranty and see if I have anyway to send it in. Yeah, this is crazy I bought this laptop cause I wanted a intel based machine (my previous laptop was a ppc ibook G4) and I have been happily trying different distros ever since I got it. So this is very disappointing right now.

@j_jerry: I am pretty sure I saw that option in the BIOS setting.

@thorkelljarl: That sounds like what I am seeing, I will definately try that tonight.

Thanks again everyone.

I agree with someone's suggestion by removing you HDD, Allot of times, on my desktop computer, one HDD would prevent me from booting my system and get the experience you having. It could be the HDD is not sitting properly. Oh by they way no matter if it's live-cd. The kernel will try to mount your HDD even if the filesystem is bad and can block the boot process. I'm not sure about grub. Also try a specialize cd like UBCD http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/. Repartition you drive and try again. I have Toshiba Laptop and my HDD had went bad and believe it or not. It was very very simple to remove, so I don't think it should be that hard for you. And try to boot from a live-cd.

P.S. How long did you wait before giving up on boot. And if you using grub, hit tab a few times before and after cursor blinking and see if anything happenes.

This seems to be what I did, now that I think about it...

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...roduct=3446948

Reburn at the slowest speed.

@IHorace: thanks for the info, and no I wasn't using grub Vector like Slackware defaults to LILO.

@jefro: thanks but its not a live CD problem I can assure you.

Will you try to remove the drive, also UBCD has some tools that you can use to see if you HDD is in good health... I say tryout UBCD... If you can't burn it, let us know... Did you try @thorkelljarl suggestion... I hate to say it, but it also could be the end for HDD... LILO, can have similiar command, if not tab...

Man this is so frustrating, I did that hard reset as suggested, no luck. I made a USB bootable version of puppy linux 4.3, no luck. I think I am going to send this back to Lenovo. Thanks for the help and suggestions.

Sounds like the dvd rom is messed up. Do you have another? I didn't see ( maybe I overlooked it ) where you tried one of the boot discs in another computer. Still, I keep thinking it's the dvd rom. If you could find another dvd rom and try it. If that's not it it's gotta be the motherboard -- send it back to Lenovo for a replacement.

Sorry for your troubles BoydRice. I was really hoping all of us would figure this one out. By the way, which Lenovo model do you have there?

@btncix: the laptop is a Lenovo Ideapad y430, pretty nice machine with good specs for the price I paid. I had originally wanted a Thinkpad but even a refurbished one with lesser specs cost more than the Ideapad. The laptop is still under warranty so they are going to send me a box, have me send it out and then swap the hard drive, re-image it and send it back. They said it would take around 5 business days. Thanks again for the suggestions and help, it was much appreciated and definately more helpful than the Vector Linux forum. The LQ forums are truly awesome. As soon as I get this thing back I am going to try Slackware again.

@SharpyWarpy: thanks for the suggestion but I didn't have another DVD drive to try out. I doubt that it would have worked as it wouldn't boot from the flash drive and I know the BIOS supports it.