Booting a Non-system Disk (please read on)
by fredmyra from LinuxQuestions.org on (#57ASZ)
My old HP Probook 4510s is once again displaying " Non-system disk or disk error".
It is not the first time. That was when I tried installing Absolute Linux, 2 years ago.
At the time I nuked the MBR sector and a couple of the following sectors, and proceeded to reinstall my 12 versions of Linux. Lost some data but had a sufficiently good back-up.
This time I am not that lucky. Data is not a problem, as this is a secondary machine, which I nonetheless use intensively for searching and media consumption. an d as an experimental station where I try installation of (to me ) new distributions of Linux.
When I first got the error message in the present case I decide to do some googling before attempting to solve the problem.I spent a couple days reading and tried every suggestion I found with the exception of taking out the hard disk. I am not very good at reassembling things.
I have found some videos showing how to take out the hard disk in this model but I have not tried it yet because I found out that booting from an usb pendrive I had access to (apparently) all partitions and files. The HP disk tests resulted both (the long and the short versions) in OK. Fsck did not report any errors or failures.
Furthermore I was able to boot into systems on the hard disk, by booting from an usb pendrive and typing the information from the grub.cfg in the grub prompt.
Not only that but late one night when I was exhausted I misspelled the drive in a rm command and there went the whole hard disk instead of just the intended partition.
So I nuked the first four sectors on the disk and proceeded to install 2 distros on the HD and then booted them from the usb's grub. Because when I try to boot from the Hard disk I still get the "non-system disk or disk error" tune.
I am writing from one of them right now.
After every guidance I found in my search and tried, I got always the same error message.
I have had this message also on some usb pen drives, after installing some distros on them.
This time it happened right upon the installation of Artix (hmmmm cant quite recall now whether it was XFCE or Mate, 100% one of these two. And 100% it was "open-rc" variety.
I have run out of hypothesis now, and I really want to be able to boot in a normal way. Has anyone some idea on how that might be possible ?
Thanks in advance.
It is not the first time. That was when I tried installing Absolute Linux, 2 years ago.
At the time I nuked the MBR sector and a couple of the following sectors, and proceeded to reinstall my 12 versions of Linux. Lost some data but had a sufficiently good back-up.
This time I am not that lucky. Data is not a problem, as this is a secondary machine, which I nonetheless use intensively for searching and media consumption. an d as an experimental station where I try installation of (to me ) new distributions of Linux.
When I first got the error message in the present case I decide to do some googling before attempting to solve the problem.I spent a couple days reading and tried every suggestion I found with the exception of taking out the hard disk. I am not very good at reassembling things.
I have found some videos showing how to take out the hard disk in this model but I have not tried it yet because I found out that booting from an usb pendrive I had access to (apparently) all partitions and files. The HP disk tests resulted both (the long and the short versions) in OK. Fsck did not report any errors or failures.
Furthermore I was able to boot into systems on the hard disk, by booting from an usb pendrive and typing the information from the grub.cfg in the grub prompt.
Not only that but late one night when I was exhausted I misspelled the drive in a rm command and there went the whole hard disk instead of just the intended partition.
So I nuked the first four sectors on the disk and proceeded to install 2 distros on the HD and then booted them from the usb's grub. Because when I try to boot from the Hard disk I still get the "non-system disk or disk error" tune.
I am writing from one of them right now.
After every guidance I found in my search and tried, I got always the same error message.
I have had this message also on some usb pen drives, after installing some distros on them.
This time it happened right upon the installation of Artix (hmmmm cant quite recall now whether it was XFCE or Mate, 100% one of these two. And 100% it was "open-rc" variety.
I have run out of hypothesis now, and I really want to be able to boot in a normal way. Has anyone some idea on how that might be possible ?
Thanks in advance.