Thinkpads Forum

Hello All,

I have come to ask for help with my laptop. I have had an ultrabay adapter installed and working as a second disk in windows for roughly 6 months. The disk that I have installed in the bay is the original disk that shipped with the laptop, the primary disk is now a SSD. It is recognized in BIOS, windows and by the several different linux distributions I have attempted to install on it.

My problem is: I am unable to boot to the disk installed in the ultrabay after installing linux on it. What I am doing is booting to a USB device to install linux to the ultrabay disk I am able to partition and format the disk and then complete the installation. Upon reboot, I hit F12, and select the ultrabay disk from the device list, after that I see only a black screen with a blinking cursor.

I have reset the BIOS to the default settings, I have ensured that the linux boot partition is marked as active. I am still able to boot to windows in the main drive bay, I can view the linux partition from windows, and can confirm that the OS has been installed. Regardless of what I do, I always get the same result: a black screen and blinking cursor.

Anybody have a clue as to why this is happening?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank You.

When you say "I can view the linux partition from windows", do you mean you can browse the contents of that partition, or just see the partition itself? It would be unusual if you can actually see the contents, because native Linux file systems (ext3, ext4, etc.) are certainly not readable by Windows directly.

Which Linux distribution have you installed? Most likely the boot loader was not installed correctly.

Sorry, should have clarified what I meant about viewing the drive from windows: I can see the drive, and partition table in Windows Disk Management as expected, but also, I am using a utility called Explore2fs http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs to actually confirm the install has been written as expected.

I have installed CentOS on the 2nd hard disk. I have installed the bootloader on the first sector of the 2nd (UltraBay) hard disk using the CentOS installer.

I beleive that you are correct in saying that the bootloader is the source of my issue. I have done some research today and found that GRUB (the bootloader being installed by the CentOS installer) is designed to be installed to the MBR on the 1st BIOS disk. Because I have a working Windows install on this drive, I do not wish to overwrite the Windows MBR with GRUB. It's my guess that editing the GRUB .config file will be the resolution to this issue.

Did you install the Linux bootloader (GRUB) to the MBR of the second hard drive, or to a partition of the second hard drive? If it was the MBR, you should be able to boot the second hard drive via F12.

Anyways, try booting with a Super Grub2 boot disk http://www.supergrubdisk.org/ . From there you can try several things: use the automatic detection provided, or go into the command line and chainload a GRUB installation on the second hard drive.

You may also want to go into /boot directory of the Linux partition and see what's in there.