ThinkVantage Maintenance software froze my OS (Z60m)

[Slippenos]

I have a Lenovo Z60m and a dual-boot environment. I have an NTFS partition (XP) on /dev/sda1, swap on /dev/sda2, and Ubuntu Hardy Heron on /dev/sda3.

I recently downladed and installed the "ThinkVantage Maintenance Manager" (scrubbed XP a few months ago). One of the steps was it wanted me to update my BIOS.

Anyways, after it installed the BIOS my machine powered down. When I restarted I saw a black screen with a prompt that said "GRUB" and a blinking cursor (that did not allow me to type anything).

Naturally I thought I should just run "fixmbr" from the Windows Rescue prompt as Lenovo screwed up my master boot record. I did this on C:/WINDOWS and C:/minint. No luck.

I reinstalled GRUB from the Live Ubuntu CD. Luckily I can still use LINUX. More luckily, I can still view the contents of this partiton (mounted on /media/ntfs_1).

I cannot, however, boot into Windows. GRUB shows "Starting up ..."; but just hangs there.

I am so frustrated! I do not want to reinstall the OS and reinstall/reconfigure everything. All I want to do is pick up where this installation left off.

Any thoughts? Suggestions?

Thanks,
Mike

[blue]Go to work to learn. Don't go to work to earn.[/blue]

 

[BadBigBen]

probably need to reconfigure GRUB, to read the windows partition correctly...

Grub's Windows entry (/boot/grub/menu.lst) should look something along these lines, Windows being on the first HDD and first partition (like you described):

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
makeaktive

Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.

 

[Slippenos]

Thanks for the reply, Ben (could you sense my desperation?). I have pretty much the exact same entry for my XP partition.

Only thing I can think of is that when I bought this laptop a few years ago it had a small FAT32 partition for some backup process. Perhaps the installation encountered some fatal error attempting to setup this function and cannot proceed?

I'm thinking about taking a few (8-9) hours and just redoing everything ..

Thanks,
Mike

[blue]Go to work to learn. Don't go to work to earn.[/blue]

 

[BadBigBen]

if you start out fresh, then I would suggest you first BOMB the drive (see DBAN - Darik's Boot and Nuke), that way you are sure that the drive is not causing any hick ups...

then install Windows first (like you had it, on the first partition), get it fully set up, and last install Ubuntu so that it can write the GRUB loader correctly...

list your MENU.LST entry, so that I can take a look at it...

Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.

 

[Slippenos]

title		Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-22-generic
root		(hd0,2)
kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-22-generic root=UUID=52202b85-01b6-4a14-a13c-c673a4797e82 ro quiet splash
initrd		/boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-22-generic

title		Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root		(hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader	+1

The repartitioning went well. Both OS's are fully functioning and my sanity is slowly coming back.

Thanks for the help,
Mike



[blue]Go to work to learn. Don't go to work to earn.[/blue]