Not Debian-related at all, but you folks are brilliant, so I'll ask anyway.
A friend brought her HP Pavilion ze5170 laptop to me the other day; she
said her hard drive had died, and she ordered a new one, and on
installing it she could never get the System Restore CDs to restore the
system. She also wanted to set up the laptop to dual-boot with Debian,
which is why she brought it to me.
The System Recovery process boots and starts normally, but in the
partitioning step early in the process, it starts to run very slowly,
dropping to a crawl at "Verifying Partition" and never finishing even
after 36 hours.
So I've spent the last two days with it, trying the System Restore CDs,
manually modifying/formatting partitions, Knoppix, an older Etch CD and
one downloaded just today.
Basically, I've decided the drive was not the problem, but something in
the BIOS/mobo/controller.
I can install Etch, but on reboot, GRUB takes tens of minutes to make
any progress, and never, after hours of waiting, gets all the way to the
GRUB menu.
I can boot off of Knoppix and chroot into Etch and do anything I want. I
even installed LILO. So the drive is quite functional during "normal"
usage. But on rebooting, LILO exhibited similar behavior to that of GRUB.
In addition to the original drive she thought was bad (but seems fine
when put into another laptop), and the new drive, I also tried a third
drive. The laptop exhibited the same symptoms with each.
So the machine boots fine off and runs off the CD drive just fine.
It performs just fine during installation of Etch and running a chroot'd
environment.
But it won't boot off the hard drive, or get past the partitioning stage
of the Recovery CDs.
So I'm hoping some of you folks might know more precisely what is
causing this.
It seems that the IDE controller is fine, since the CDROM drive works,
and the drive works most of the time.
It seems that the mobo is fine.
The BIOS seems to function. (But she did mention that the BIOS does not
keep time; perhaps a dead BIOS battery (do laptops have those?) is
corrupting some boot-level code of the BIOS without making the BIOS
totally screwy?)
So what could explain these symptoms? (I don't expect a fix; I'm just
hoping for an explanation.)
Thanks!
--
Kent
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