Member Avatar for jbennet

BSD broke my thinkpad. I have searched and apparently when the machine starts up the bios looks for a hibernate partition (which happens to be similar to the bsd filesystem) so it hangs.

I cant tell it to boot from the cd instead and then use a livecd to kill the bsd instillation as this is straight at bootup - it doesnt even post.

It boots up fine without the hdd drive. Anyone know how i can delete the bsd instillation off the lapops drive from my desktop ?- a laptop to desktop size hdd connector maybe?

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A short, practical supplement to the thread: the two reliable paths when a laptop firmware will not continue boot with a particular drive attached are (a) change/reset firmware behavior so the machine boots external media, or (b) work on the drive externally from another host. pointed toward the firmware route; the approach taken by — moving the disk to a different machine and cleaning it — is the common fallback. Below are safer, repeatable steps and tools for the external-work route, plus a few recovery cautions.

First: preserve data before destructive actions. Create an image with GNU ddrescue to avoid losing recoverable files:

ddrescue -f -n /dev/sdX disk-image.img rescue.log

See the ddrescue project for usage details (GNU ddrescue).

Second: attempt non-destructive repairs. Run TestDisk to try to restore partition tables and recover files. If recovery is not required or fails, remove on-disk filesystem/partition signatures and reset the table. Two common commands are:

wipefs -a /dev/sdX
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=1

wipefs removes filesystem signatures; dd clears the first megabyte (MB) including MBR/GPT headers. Read the wipefs and dd manuals for details (wipefs man page, dd man page). For GPT disks, sgdisk --zap-all /dev/sdX (gdisk) is an alternative (gdisk reference).

Safety notes: always confirm the device node (lsblk/fdisk -l) before running destructive commands. Imaging first is strongly recommended. If the laptop firmware can be reset to defaults or updated, try that first — it can avoid hardware removal. For SSDs, prefer signature removal rather than full-disk zeroing to limit wear.

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Member Avatar for John A

BSD broke my thinkpad. I have searched and apparently when the machine starts up the bios looks for a hibernate partition (which happens to be similar to the bsd filesystem) so it hangs.

I cant tell it to boot from the cd instead and then use a livecd to kill the bsd instillation as this is straight at bootup - it doesnt even post.

It boots up fine without the hdd drive. Anyone know how i can delete the bsd instillation off the lapops drive from my desktop ?- a laptop to desktop size hdd connector maybe?

First of all, have you tried changing the BIOS config? On some laptops, this is not possible, but there is *usually* a way to fix this. Usually, a simple "Bios reset" menu option will do the trick. Also, does your laptop have a floppy drive? Most BIOSs are configured to boot from the floppy drive first. You could then insert a Win/Linux boot disk and repair the system (or use it to boot the CD).

If this doesn't work, then I would suggest using a connector, although I don't really know much about that.

Member Avatar for jbennet

Sorted. I tried selecting booting from a floppy but it wouldnt for some reason so evetually baught an adapter from maplin and wiped the disk from another machine. Runs fine now. (I just installed debian Etch)

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