Arch Linux

Vithrinful

Member

Registered: 2012-05-11

Posts: 2

Booting problems with my laptop

Hello.
I am running Arch on my laptop (Acer Aspire 5250) and everything works pretty well except for a big problem when booting. I am not sure if the problem is because I am doing something wrong or my laptop hates linux, because I had this problem with other distributions too.

I can only boot linux after booting into windows and then rebooting the computer. I find this very annoying because windows takes a lot of time to boot. Sadly I need windows in this laptop so uninstalling it isn't an option

I have a 500gb drive with the default windows ultimate partition (about 100mb), the main windows partition, a "data" ntfs partition and Arch in the last partition.
I have tried booting into fallback mode and I still got this problem.
GRUB is working very well, the system boots normally but it freezes after a few seconds.
I couldn't find anything in google about this problem.

Thank you for your help.

lagagnon

Member

From: an Island in the Pacific...

Registered: 2009-12-10

Posts: 1,087

Website

Re: Booting problems with my laptop

Show us output of the following commands from Linux:

sudo fdisk -l
cat /boot/grub/menu.lst
df -h

Also, have you tried setting your BIOS setup to basic defaults. I wonder whether it might be a BIOS issue. Also, try upgrading the BIOS firmware....

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Philosophy is looking for a black cat in a dark room. Metaphysics is looking for a black cat in a dark room that isn't there. Religion is looking for a black cat in a dark room that isn't there and shouting "I found it!". Science is looking for a black cat in a dark room with a flashlight.

Vithrinful

Member

Registered: 2012-05-11

Posts: 2

Re: Booting problems with my laptop

Thank you very much for your reply.

Excuse me if I'm wrong, but /boot/grub/menu.lst was removed in GRUB2, so I'm posting /etc/default/grub, wich I think is the same (is it?)

Edit: The post was a bit too large, sorry. Here is the code: http://pastebin.com/11GCPPMq
Changed BIOS settings to default - still having the same problem.

Last edited by Vithrinful (2012-05-18 17:47:23)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,484

Website

Re: Booting problems with my laptop

I barely understand these aspects myself, but as I've read, you cannot boot to an extended partition.  Your /boot partition at least needs to be on a primary partition (AKA one of the first four IIRC).

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

ntaloventi

Member

From: Jakarta

Registered: 2012-04-07

Posts: 17

Website

Re: Booting problems with my laptop

same problem with me...
then I try dual boot, but never works on me...
when I'm trying boot to Win****
my Win**** ask to insert startup disk...
then I'm full eliminate my old Win****
keep attention to using that option...