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.
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.
I'm pretty sure that's the case. After a deep level format on a windows machine there is still less than 80G available. Where would I find the "prep utility"?
I have a repair and recover disk from Lenovo - it doesn't work either.