Thinkpads Forum

On Friday morning my Lenovo T60 stopped working. When I turn the completer on it goes to a screen that says "cannot boot from any device" and then lists 1-7 the boot order and device status. 5 say: "Device not Found", 2 say: "No Valid Operating system".

I have some very critical documents to pull off the c drive that would take hours to recreate. Is their anyway I can get this to boot up one more time? Is there anything I can do?

Yes, there are several things you can do. However, let's differentiate between:
(a) being able to boot again, and
(b) booting into the same operating system/file system you had before the problem.

First, however, you need to assess if the hard drive is spinning (assuming that you have a mechanical disk drive, not an SSD). Turn on the machine and listen if the hard drive starts spinning. If no, then remove and "reseat" the drive and try again. If it is spinning, then proceed with the next steps below:

(a) is easy; (b) may be more difficult or impossible, depending on the level of the "damage" at hand.

For (a), there are several approaches, all of which require access to a working computer:
1) get a USB flash drive, create a bootable "stub" on it, place the flash drive in the T60, boot from it, and examine the drive(s)/file(s) of your existing machine.
2) create a bootable CD-ROM or DVD and do same as (a) above.

Note: If the partition on which you have your files is NTFS format, then you might need an NTFS file reader (free utilities) to view/access the files on that partition.

For (b) above, the problem may be as simple as reconstructing the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the hard drive. Do as for (a), include FDISK.EXE, and after booting, run "FDISK.EXE / MBR" ... then see if the machine boots.

Tell us more details of where you stand with respect to access to other working machines, software tools, floppy and/or flash drives, etc., and someone here will be able to guide you to "recovery" ... if recovery is possible.

EOMtp, you're AWESOME!

I didn't now the hard drive was so easily removed. My son read your instructions took out and inserted it back in and IT WORKS!!!!!!!!

I can't tell you how thankful I am. I had no clue what to do tomorrow morning.

Again, thanks BIG TIME!