imundzana
August 2nd, 2013, 01:27 AM
i installed 12.04 64bit on my brother's lenovo ideapad y480 about a year ago alongside win7, and everything seemed fine and he used it a lot. recently it became slow and unresponsive.
long story short(ish), i re-installed 12.04 using the same partitions. on restart the grub was gone, so i used a SuperGRUB2 disk to start up in ubuntu and i was checking stuff out and noticed the extended partition was misaligned. not cool. so i wiped out the extended partition that had / and the swap and did a fresh install hoping that would fix the misalignment issue. after the install (but before restart) i checked disk utility again, and it didn't have the misalignment warning any more. it did say there were "a few bad sectors"...but it said that before i started changing things.
at this point, not much is happening. when you push the power button, the lenovo screen comes up with "press F2 for setup" and "press F12 for boot device selection menu"
if i let it try to boot, without a liveUSB plugged in i get a black screen with the white _ in the top left. it's not even blinking;)
if i press F2 for BIOS menu, i get the same black screen with the white _ in the top left.
if i press F12, it does come up with the list of devices (EFI USB, SATA HDD, SATA ODD (Disk drive), USB HDD, and Network Boot). i have tried all those, with the 12.04 liveUSB which i have successfully used several times, and with a SuperGRUB2 disk and a Boot Repair 64bit disk.
no matter which option i choose, it goes straight to a plain black screen, with no evidence that it's working on anything (such as read-sounds from the disk drive or blinking pendrive light)
i've been doing this for a while, but please feel free to talk to me (and explain things) like i'm a noob. i would appreciate anything i can learn from this experience, and if at all possible, i would especially love to get my brother's computer up and running before he leaves for college soon!
thanks!
-zac
long story short(ish), i re-installed 12.04 using the same partitions. on restart the grub was gone, so i used a SuperGRUB2 disk to start up in ubuntu and i was checking stuff out and noticed the extended partition was misaligned. not cool. so i wiped out the extended partition that had / and the swap and did a fresh install hoping that would fix the misalignment issue. after the install (but before restart) i checked disk utility again, and it didn't have the misalignment warning any more. it did say there were "a few bad sectors"...but it said that before i started changing things.
at this point, not much is happening. when you push the power button, the lenovo screen comes up with "press F2 for setup" and "press F12 for boot device selection menu"
if i let it try to boot, without a liveUSB plugged in i get a black screen with the white _ in the top left. it's not even blinking;)
if i press F2 for BIOS menu, i get the same black screen with the white _ in the top left.
if i press F12, it does come up with the list of devices (EFI USB, SATA HDD, SATA ODD (Disk drive), USB HDD, and Network Boot). i have tried all those, with the 12.04 liveUSB which i have successfully used several times, and with a SuperGRUB2 disk and a Boot Repair 64bit disk.
no matter which option i choose, it goes straight to a plain black screen, with no evidence that it's working on anything (such as read-sounds from the disk drive or blinking pendrive light)
i've been doing this for a while, but please feel free to talk to me (and explain things) like i'm a noob. i would appreciate anything i can learn from this experience, and if at all possible, i would especially love to get my brother's computer up and running before he leaves for college soon!
thanks!
-zac