bliss
December 24th, 2004, 03:01 AM
I have been having trouble with my laptop as of late; it's a Dell Inspiron 1100 purchased around July 2003 running a dual boot of Fedora Core 2 (2.6 kernel) and Windows XP, if this information helps anybody understand the following any better.
It all started a few days ago when I was trying to test some CDs before sending them out, making sure they were bootable. Both CDs did not boot; at first I thought this had something to do with them having been burnt copies, so I tried booting from the original CDs (both of which I had booted from in the past) - soon, I realised that my computer was refusing to boot from CD. Further testing on my father's computer showed that all those CDs were actually bootable. If any extra details help, I will also add that the CD-ROM became active (well, the light lit up and it started spinning) when I booted, but stopped when my bootloader showed up.
I have a USB floppy drive; of course after finding out I couldn't boot from CD, I wanted to see if I could boot from floppy - no such luck.
Although I had been able to boot from CD countless times before, I decided to check the BIOS setup to see if the boot sequence hadn't suddenly decided to go all weir don me. It was then that I discovered that I could not even enter the BIOS setup - no matter if I held F2 down or stabbed it multiple times, it just ignored me and went on to load the bootloader, just like it ignored the CD and floppy.
But wait - it gets even better, more complicated. Or much, much worse, but better in entertainment value. At this poin in the tale, I am only irked by the fact that my BIOS is ignoring me and the boot sequence isn't going as it should; however, I was still able to boot both my Windows and Linux partitions just fine.
Now, I hadn't need to boot from CD since installing BootMagic, the bootloader I was using, and I hadn't made any other "major" changes to my system since then, so I automatically assumed BootMagic was somehow wreaking havoc with my BIOS or something. I disabled BootMagic, then tried again with the setup and boot CD; no luck, again.
After this I decided to do a bit of experimenting and changed the bootable partition from the one Windows was installed on to my Linux boot partition.
Oops. Although I had a Windows entry in GRUB, it didn't work correctly (every time I tried to boot Windows from there, it would tell me "autochk not found" and then I'd be BSOD'd - this was the reason I always had to boot from my PartitionMagic CD in the past, so I could switch the bootable partition to Windows and thus not get these crazy errors) - joy, now I had no way of getting into Windows. And it was STILL not booting from CD nor letting me into the BIOS. I was mystified.
So I had my father check the situation out, and he figured out how to use GRUB to boot to the Dell Diagnostic partition, but nothing more.
This is the part where my own sheer and utter stupidity come into play. I got to wondering whether Dad's commands to get to the Dell Diag. could be used to boot to Windows - or rather, make Windows boot properly from GRUB. As one might expect from the tale so far, it didn't. Instead, it screwed up the computer COMPLETELY - now, it starts up and shows me the BIOS screen, the monitor blinks, shows a blank screen, blinks again, and goes to the Windows startup screen, where it proceeds to tell me it can't find autocheck and then either reboots in an endless cycle of rebirth and suicide, or gives me the blue screen of death.
If anybody's interested, the commands were this:
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader --force +1
makeactive
boot
Something in that must have made it start Windows automatically, although I don't see how because I didn't think GRUB commands were still used after the computer was rebooted.
And that is the point I am at right now.
Should anybody have any suggestions for me whatsoever, I'd greatly appreciate any help I'm able to get. I apologise if this seemed to be more of a story than a nice technical description of what went wrong; I'm just always seeing people ask for more info and whatnot, and thustried to include every detail I could remember of the incident(s) in here. Once again, I'd really appreciate any suggestions as to what to do next or what could be going on here. Thanks.
It all started a few days ago when I was trying to test some CDs before sending them out, making sure they were bootable. Both CDs did not boot; at first I thought this had something to do with them having been burnt copies, so I tried booting from the original CDs (both of which I had booted from in the past) - soon, I realised that my computer was refusing to boot from CD. Further testing on my father's computer showed that all those CDs were actually bootable. If any extra details help, I will also add that the CD-ROM became active (well, the light lit up and it started spinning) when I booted, but stopped when my bootloader showed up.
I have a USB floppy drive; of course after finding out I couldn't boot from CD, I wanted to see if I could boot from floppy - no such luck.
Although I had been able to boot from CD countless times before, I decided to check the BIOS setup to see if the boot sequence hadn't suddenly decided to go all weir don me. It was then that I discovered that I could not even enter the BIOS setup - no matter if I held F2 down or stabbed it multiple times, it just ignored me and went on to load the bootloader, just like it ignored the CD and floppy.
But wait - it gets even better, more complicated. Or much, much worse, but better in entertainment value. At this poin in the tale, I am only irked by the fact that my BIOS is ignoring me and the boot sequence isn't going as it should; however, I was still able to boot both my Windows and Linux partitions just fine.
Now, I hadn't need to boot from CD since installing BootMagic, the bootloader I was using, and I hadn't made any other "major" changes to my system since then, so I automatically assumed BootMagic was somehow wreaking havoc with my BIOS or something. I disabled BootMagic, then tried again with the setup and boot CD; no luck, again.
After this I decided to do a bit of experimenting and changed the bootable partition from the one Windows was installed on to my Linux boot partition.
Oops. Although I had a Windows entry in GRUB, it didn't work correctly (every time I tried to boot Windows from there, it would tell me "autochk not found" and then I'd be BSOD'd - this was the reason I always had to boot from my PartitionMagic CD in the past, so I could switch the bootable partition to Windows and thus not get these crazy errors) - joy, now I had no way of getting into Windows. And it was STILL not booting from CD nor letting me into the BIOS. I was mystified.
So I had my father check the situation out, and he figured out how to use GRUB to boot to the Dell Diagnostic partition, but nothing more.
This is the part where my own sheer and utter stupidity come into play. I got to wondering whether Dad's commands to get to the Dell Diag. could be used to boot to Windows - or rather, make Windows boot properly from GRUB. As one might expect from the tale so far, it didn't. Instead, it screwed up the computer COMPLETELY - now, it starts up and shows me the BIOS screen, the monitor blinks, shows a blank screen, blinks again, and goes to the Windows startup screen, where it proceeds to tell me it can't find autocheck and then either reboots in an endless cycle of rebirth and suicide, or gives me the blue screen of death.
If anybody's interested, the commands were this:
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader --force +1
makeactive
boot
Something in that must have made it start Windows automatically, although I don't see how because I didn't think GRUB commands were still used after the computer was rebooted.
And that is the point I am at right now.
Should anybody have any suggestions for me whatsoever, I'd greatly appreciate any help I'm able to get. I apologise if this seemed to be more of a story than a nice technical description of what went wrong; I'm just always seeing people ask for more info and whatnot, and thustried to include every detail I could remember of the incident(s) in here. Once again, I'd really appreciate any suggestions as to what to do next or what could be going on here. Thanks.