Volitions Advocate on 26/9/2010 at 02:03
I've copied this over from a forum full of experts who don't want to help me.
I've found this topic elsewhere on the net, but with different configurations and none of them helped me much. Plus a search on this forum turned up 0 results.
the machine:
Acer Aspire Timeline X 1830T
i3 (don't remember the clock speed)
4 GB ram
Intel HD graphics
11.6" LCD 1366 x 768
320GB HD with recovery partition. windows partition, and 100GB linux partition
Windows 7 home 64bit
Ubuntu 10.04
Grub installed on MBR
the situation:
Ubuntu is having some issues on this netbook, I wont get into them because I dont believe they are relevant to my problem. so I thought I'd check out another distro that a friend of mine is using. Linux Mint, so I created a Live CD on my USB thumbdrive and booted into it to check it out.. well it turns out mint is built on ubuntu.. so the problems are all exactly the same... I i restart the computer to boot back into windows to check out another distro. but suddenly it wont boot.
after the BIOS screen, in the upper left corner a very bright and thick cursor appears and doesn't blink. Then it disappears and is immediately replaced by a normal sized, and normal brightness cursor that just blinks. and nothing happens.
I didn't make any changes to my bios before booting the live CD because I keep my boot order with USB HD at the top, this is technically a sub-notebook so it has no optical drive.
i can't seem to make grub load, I'm not sure if that is exactly the problem or not, so right now i'm posting this from my linux mint live CD. I can access the harddrive and move stuff around, there seems to be no read errors, on either partition.
any help would be appreciated, I'm very restricted in what I can do right now because everything has to be done from this live CD.
Not entirely true, I do have my desktop.
If it is a problem with the MBR, maybe if I install mint over my ubuntu partition it will reinstall grub and work again? Just a thought.
Tried that, can't get it to install over the ubuntu partition, it keeps giving me an error about the filesystem not being set up.
I can't bring up the F8 menu, or the Alt-F10 menu for recovery. and when the black screen is there the num, scroll, and caps, keys dont' even turn their respective lights on.
Right now i'm downloading a W7 iso so that I can try to "repair" it from there.... Assuming it even detects a problem.
has anybody else had a problem with this? Everywhere I look at these "black screen of death" problems, they all occur after login, or after windows starts. not before.
Ostriig on 26/9/2010 at 02:32
It's really late, so I might be posting out of my ass here, but is it at all possible that you might've fucked your bootloader and for some reason that particular BIOS your laptop has isn't set to report that? I mean, I don't see right away how that would've happened, since you said said you ran Linux off a live CD, not installed it, but it might be worth trying to restore the bootloader with that W7 iso once you have it. You should have an option under Repair or something to that effect once you boot up the iso, I remember having done this sort of thing for Vista when I managed to screw up its bootloader with a cancelled XP install, but in my case it did explicitly throw a "No appropriate bootloader found" error, hence why I think it might be a long shot that you're having the same problem.
Volitions Advocate on 26/9/2010 at 04:27
That was my thought, but when I run the startup repair detecter thingy it doesn't detect a problem, it tells me to unplug any extra devices I may have plugged in. I'm assuming it thinks maybe the computer is trying to boot from an SD card inside my digital camera or something, but thats not the case obviously. I'm trying to see if I can reinstall the mbr from a command prompt, but I can't seem to find the fdisk command anywhere on the disk. I'm looking up how to do this now.......
hmm.. apparently the command FIXMBR is now a normal windows command. I'll try that.
I'll report if it works.
EDIT: or.... find out what else microsoft changed from OS to OS. (
http://www.ehow.com/how_4836283_repair-mbr-windows.html)
Volitions Advocate on 26/9/2010 at 04:56
HOLY SHIT this is not easy sometimes.
no fdisk since windows ME
fixmbr does not exist after XP apparently
bootsect didn't work.
but!
x:\windows\system32\bootrec /fixmbr DID work.. finally.
What a pain in the ass!
Renzatic on 26/9/2010 at 06:29
Eh, it wasn't that bad. I've had to do it twice over the last few months because I realized I wanted more disk space in lieu of Linux. The only confusing thing about it was having to go to the D: prompt to execute bootrec, because the recovery console considers that little 200Mb space at the front of the drive C: for some ignert reason.
