Thinkpads Forum

Hello,

I'm in a bad situation right now. I tried to install linux (SLED 10) on my WS T60p and dual boot with XP, but now all I get when I turn on my ThinkPad is the ThinkPad preboot screen and then the screen turns black with a blinking white cursor in the top left corner. No button combinations work at this time.

When I try to push the Thinkvantage button to interrupt booting, the same thing happens.

I can access Rescue and Recovery via an external hard drive where I placed a back up before I installed linux. When I boot from there, I am prompted for my Windows Password. I type in my Windows XP Password and push OK but I get a message telling me that a password is not configured and it does not let me enter R&R to restore my system.

As of now, my laptop is pretty much bricked so I really hope someone out there can help me. Thanks in advanced.

your best bet is to get a set of recovery discs either from a friend or Lenovo directly thought they might charge you if you claimed that you didn't burn them yourself. Just tell them that you couldn't burn your own set and request them to send a set to you. You shouldn't have a problem with the CDs thought it will take about a day to reset everything. Hope this helps.

What exactly did you do when you installed SLED 10? Did you try to uninstall at any point? I ask because I'm wondering if you messed up your MBR and you may have some options. Also, have you tried booting from your SLED disc? If you can change your boot order in BIOS you can boot from the cd and you can do 2 things:

1) boot from hard disk (which won't work)

2) Select installation and then there should be an "Other Options" (or something like that) button and you can do some diagnostics/repair there.

Before you do that, though, you should give a little more info. about what you actually did.

Thanks for the quick and helpful replies. I successfully booted SUSE from the installation CD which indicated that my partitions were probably in tact and my MBR was probably screwy. I managed to do some editing in linux and fix my MBR and GRUB and my dual boot works flawlessly now. Thanks again for the help!