Tech help ping.
There’s a list I’ll provide below...but Linux is a hardy system - but the laptop may just be outfight gone...they produce a lot of heat in tight quarters...you may have to look for a replacement hard drive and then load the free Linux OS on to it making sure the memory is good to go as well...Laptops can last a long time if properly maintained - but, like all computers - heat = death eventually.
oh - also completely wipe the drive using Darik’s Boot And Nuke
Then change the Boot order to DVD or CD drive - and try loading Linux OS in a clean install...
do you or anyone you know have a bootable USB of Linux?
My HDD failed last year and I got a new one. I put Ubuntu on it and I am happy with it.
Turn it on.
you might look at the RAM
I had a 2003 HP XP laptop that kept rebooting
so old it has serial, parallel (!) and 3.5” floppy, IR, etc, i wanted to keep it alive as a relic for those old school interfaces. maybe use as an air-gapped device
but it kept rebooting. or locking up in BIOS (before “Windows” load screen bmp appeared.)
No POST beeps, by the way.
HDD checked out
swapped slots on the 2 dimms
was ok at first, then problem recurred
pulled the dimms one at a time.
ran full mem tests
One dimm was intermittently throwing errors
I just stopped using it but had decided that I could get get replacement dimms at Newegg for about $50.
might try a ham /pc fest if one’s near you to pick up some out-style dimms
My netbook wouldn’t boot - turns out one of the sticks of RAM I upgraded with went bad. Removed the bad RAM and it booted fine. Try it.
I had trouble with a Dell laptop — hd glitches.
I finally bought a new hd.
When I originally started up the laptop, I made the Dell emergency image disks. I used those to image the new hd.
It worked okay.
I then, restored a more recent image with my software programs, etc.
==
Initially, using the restore disk took a while.
Are you sure yours quit? Does it actually give you an error message on screen? If not, it may just be restoring some large images to the HD. Let it run a while — it make take an hour or more.
My restore formatted as it went, so the first of 3 disks took a long while.
If you don’t care about what’s on the disk, go on your working computer and Google “Ultimate Boot CD.” Download the installer to put it on a USB thumb drive. Install it on a USB drive, and boot off of it on the laptop.
You’ll have a series of options in a text menu. Arrow down to ‘HDD’ and use one of the drive wiping utilities to completely wipe out the disk, essentially setting it back to default. Once you have a clean disk, download your preferred flavor of Linux (I’m an Ubuntu fan myself), and get the “LiveCD” version to put on a USB drive. Boot off of that USB disk and start your installation, and you’re off to the races.
I use an old version of Linux Puppy to just go in and peek around. Used it a couple of times to recover documents and precious photos.
Some of those old win9x era laptops REQUIRED a utility partition - Part of the Bios actually lives on the HDD. Dunno if your Levono/IBM does or not, but an 80g drive would put the machine back far enough to be close to those shenanigans. Perhaps that is where ‘Levono Care’ used to reside. If that is the case, That would explain why the HDD checks out fine, but isn’t bootable... The BIOS is trying to hand off to the utility PART, which then hands off to the boot manager.
If that is the case, the machine requires a custom Master Boot Record and utility partition, usually installed by a ‘HDD prep utility’. Repair at this point would be to zero out the drive, obtain the ‘HDD Prep utility’, get it on a bootable media, boot it in the machine and run it.
THEN, DO NOT let ‘nix install the boot manager to the MBR (as normal), but rather, to the same partition as you install ‘nix to (same deal as if you were setting it up for multiboot and not using grub as the boot manager). Custom installation should have the option.
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.
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.