[Discuss] stumped: machine won't boot

[Bill Bogstad]

On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 7:20 AM, Laura Conrad <sunny at laymusic.org> wrote:

> >>>>> "Bill" == Bill Bogstad <bogstad at pobox.com> writes:
>
>     Bill> On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 8:39 AM, Laura Conrad <
> sunny at laymusic.org>
>     Bill> wrote:
>
>     Bill>     My desktop is a lenovo I bought last fall. It has only ubuntu
>     Bill>     installed
>     Bill>     on it. There is a 500M boot partition, which seems to have
> been
>     Bill>     clobbered. The / partition looks fine, and in fact includes a
>     Bill>     /boot
>     Bill>     directory that looks normal to me.
>
>     Bill>     I rebooted it a couple of days ago because of a new kernel,
> and it
>     Bill>     wouldn't boot.
>
>     Bill>     It says it can't find an OS. I have tried boot-repair, and it
>     Bill>     thinks
>     Bill>     it has repaired things, but I still get the message about not
>     Bill>     being able
>     Bill>     to find an os.
>
>     Bill> Can you give the exact error message?
>
> Error 1962: No operating system found.
>
>     Bill> "Can't find an OS" type messages could even be from the BIOS
>     Bill> which might mean that your boot block is corrupted or your
>     Bill> boot partition isn't marked bootable.
>
> I assume it is from the bios, because Grub never comes up.  I have been
> trying via gparted and boot-repair to fix this, but it still give me the
> message.  I'm going to try Richard's suggestion of SystemRescueCD next,
> but I don't have a lot of hope.
>
> I assume this is UEFI or GPT or one of the other things that makes
> installing
> linux harder than it used to be.
>

Could be.  Googling for that exact error message and "ubuntu" finds quite a
few references
about legacy BIOS vs. UEFI booting for a wide range of Lenovo systems.   At
least one
suggested that a BIOS upgrade might help.   You might try reading some of
the discussions
found by doing the search and see what makes sense to you.

Bill Bogstad