Laptop seriously ill :(

bungalow_bill

Ok...many hours later! I have ubuntu on USB and CD, but laptop doesn't seem to be booting from them. I can change BIOS to read USB first, or CD drive etc, and can also pick out boot options from the list, but although the CD drive is whirring, or the USB is flashing, appearing as though they are being read, I can only then see a black screen with flashing cursor, but this won't take any text.

Am I doomed? Its so frustrating not even knowing what went wrong in the first place...:mad:

Toxteth_OGrady

If the aim is to get data of your hard drive before you lose it try the same with Puppy linux on CD or USB, it's much more tolerant of hardware faults.

candtalan

bungalow_bill wrote: »

Ok...many hours later! I have ubuntu on USB and CD, but laptop doesn't seem to be booting from them. I can change BIOS to read USB first, or CD drive etc, and can also pick out boot options from the list, but although the CD drive is whirring, or the USB is flashing, appearing as though they are being read, I can only then see a black screen with flashing cursor, but this won't take any text.

Am I doomed? Its so frustrating not even knowing what went wrong in the first place...:mad:

It does not sound good at this stage, but when push comes to shove, taking the hard drive out, putting it into a known working machine as a second drive or putting it into an external usb caddy would be a way of copying data from it. It would not help your ailing machine to work again though.

bungalow_bill

closed wrote: »

do you need any data from it?
if not, restore to factory settings
if yes, buy a £4 usb hard disk caddy, copy your data to another machine, then factory restore.

Sorry for the delay...I got a caddy, checked all stuff backed up, factory restored....but....now have bootmger missing message. I dont have installation disks, so is there a recommended boot manager I can download?

closed

http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Recovering+the+Vista+Bootloader+from+the+DVD