Posted on 11/18/2013 5:19:19 AM PST by raybbr
Hello to all you techies, geeks and lurkers.
I've got an older Lenovo laptop (3000 N100) that crashed for the second time in a month. It was definitely software related. Had W-XP preloaded by Lenovo. It's been running slow lately so I thought this would be a good time to Linux on it.
My sons use it for home schooling. I don't need it to do much other than surf the web and play some flash videos.
Lenovo has this thing called Lenovo Care that is installed on the LT. Does anyone know where this resides? I can't find anything in the BIOS and it still comes up without a hard drive installed.
What happened is the Lenovo Care (LC) function would come up and the LT would keep rebooting.
I put the recovery discs in and it starts the process but I would really like to get rid of LC and use the LT without it using Mint if I can. When the original disks get to a certain point it comes up with a fault. I can't remember what it is but it stops the process. I believe it has to do with hardware and the fact that the original DVD is not in there.
I pulled the hard drive out and reformatted to NTFS on another LT. It's and 80G that shows 74.5G available after formatting. I've run several tests on the HD and all come up good.
I have no internal DVD drive. I am using an external drive and the BIOS sees it and connects okay.
I put the HD into the Lenovo and boot. The screen comes up saying "No operating system found". Okay, I put an XP disc in and it tries to boot. It still shows no operating system. I tried the Linux Mint disc - same result.
I think the problem is with the LC. It still shows up during the boot process. Is it possible that it resides in some hardware and is the default boot. I can't find very much on Lenovo's site about the inner workings of LC.
I now have a LT that is working okay other than an OS. All the hardware seems to be doing its job but I can't get an OS on it.
Any help would be appreciated.
Try this...
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?DocID=DS000968
FYI... The Repair and Recovery disks most manufacturers send out only have their bundled software image. Firmware is usually something else...
It sounds as if the issue is the CD/DVD drive. Somebody on this thread mentioned that it was external?
If that is the case, then perhaps you may wish to test it on another computer. It is entirely possible that either your CD or DVD laser is fried.
Heh... I don't know - usually it will be among downloads for the machine at the manufacturer's site. Like I said, I am not even sure if IBM (Lenovo) ever even used such a thing - Compaq was notorious for it, and a few others...
Please provide the model number/specs.
Do you have another known good drive to prove with? If TWO drives don't work, it has to be hardware interface or BIOS. Right now, the drive you have may well check out fine, but if the first sector is damaged, it will still BE fine, but will never boot. So it still could be the drive too...
Is the drive SMART capable? Can you see if it has moved clusters with a SMART utility?
Remove the drive, put it in a test machine and load DOS on it, put it back in the box and look for joy...
Link I provided in 41 goes right to the Lenovo support page for the BIOS utility that should fix Ray’s UEFI problem. Info provided up-thread mention it being a Lenovo 3000 N100.
Text file even included instructions on doing an upgrade/repair to the BIOS partition.
Hope it works for ya’...
Wait a minnit - You don't get boot AT ALL, from any device? That isn't a utility partition thing - boot comes from proper BIOS, or one wouldn't be able to load the utility partition... So if BIOS is not seeing ANY boot, it has to be your DVD drive, or boot order or something. OR the drive controller on the MB sh*t the bed.
Prove the portable DVD *BOOT capable* on another machine.
Heh. Thx.. Didn’t see the model mentioned ... I’ll shut up now. : )
From what he was describing upthread, he can get it to boot, it performs the POST just fine, can get to some of the BIOS options, but after that... Lenovo Care software package doesn’t seem to allow anything to load an OS to the HD.
Possibly because of a missing UEFI partition as this HD was repartitioned and formatted NTFS on another machine.
Also, he tried the Mint disk on another machine and it worked.
We’re running low on options at this point. Means we’re either getting close to figuring it out and getting it to work, or figuring out that he has an expensive door stop.
Hehhe... :-)
Wasn’t there some messing around that Apple was doing to the BIOS of their new systems? I think MS was involved with this type of thing too for systems that came preloaded with Winders. Some sort of digital watermarking that prevented a different OS from being loaded. I don’t recall the name or term for it but your situation sounds very much like this.
But then you say this is an older laptop. So likely not the case.
If it weren’t for Unity, I may have still been using Ubuntu.. Been using Mint KDE since.
Read through the posts and didn’t see this mentioned... I’ve had a similar problem before on a laptop.. all it was was that the fan needed cleaming.. it would overheat within a couple of minutes and either give an error and shut down.. or just straight up shut down with no message.
Thanks for the link. How would I flash a BIOS if I can’t get the system to read a drive?
One thing I tried: I have an old hard drive with W7 on it from a LT that crashed a while ago. I put that in the Lenovo and it tried to start Windows, went through the repair facilities and came up with an error. I think it can’t resolve the hardware conflicts. FYI
How wonderful (and in this context, surprising!) to read someone's comments, whose experience and opinions are almost identical to my own!
My production servers run NetBSD and CentOS ("free" RHEL), and Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS for those that need it.
Don't like Unity.
Used Fedora for years in the early 2000's but switched to CentOS for solid stability.
Tonight I'm FReeping on a MacBook and working on a Win7Pro laptop, VPN'ed into my Linux/Unix server LAN at the office, with a slew of SSh/xterms running backups. With dump(8), may God have mercy on my soul. LOL!
Carry on, Good Sir!
It’s in the readme. Apparently, you launch the Lenovo Care and can then load your UEFI update off a usb or cd from there.
i was actually thinking that it might be the CD/DVD ROM drive that is hosed. Can you try to run that off another machine? If it doesn't boot on the other machine that's probably your problem.
*shrugs* I wouldn't expect Win7 to come up on different hardware and run... The hash tag off the hardware will be too far off... But it does prove the thing can boot. You could scrub your 80 off, put a 2g fat part on it and load DOS... If it will boot that, then you know your boot sector on the 80 is fine, and you can run DOS hardware diag software on it to determine what you have to work with.
As to the WINXP needed to complete the BIOS thing:
You CAN prepare a WinXP on another box... If you have a partition manager and a test bench machine:
on the 80g, Make a 10g. primary fat32 to shove the OS back (to allow room for the utility PART, which will have to be the first PART generally...
fill the rest of the drive (whatever... enough to get XP on is is all you need) with a primary NTFS PART, then Del the FAT PART.
Load it up new with XP, putting it in the NTFS PART (don't mind un-found drivers)... Then edit the reg to del the HKLM/Enum key...
Then put that hdd in the real box, boot direct to SAFE, let it find...Once it is running, boot normal, and do the deed with the BIOS thing
It will crap the XP Installation (MBR will now point to Utility part, NT suddenly on the 2nd Part instead of the 1st... Bootloader will die a cruel death)... but your utility part will be installed.... DEL the NT PART, and you are at square-one.
LOL! Dunno if you want to go to all that trouble just to find out it is a frisbee, but that oughta work.
Note that the readme for the BIOS upgrade Dead Corpse found does not state that it even has a utility partition - sounds more like an on-board flash = but I would do the above anyway, just in case (allows for a utility part if it needs it). One way or another, it seems to need the latest flash to 'fix boot problems' as the readme admits. Might look around for a DOS version of the flash utility, because it would be a whole lot easier to do with that : )
Thanks for the recipe. BTW, can I do all this using a USB bridge to the HDD? I don’t want to rip open my good LT to put drives in and out. Don’t have a box or other LT that I could do that to.
I have tried using Ultimate Boot disk but it really doesn’t recognize drives attached via USB as HDD’s. I can’t get the Command structure on it. I’ve tried formatting but it won’t make it a system disk and the /s tag doesn’t work from command prompt.
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