Thursday, May 9, 2019

windows 7 - OS won't boot from laptop - "Media test failure, check cable"

I have a 64 bit Lenovo Z570 laptop with an Intel i5 processor. Until recently, I've been solely running linux mint on it without problems (the laptop shipped with windows 7). Yesterday I decided to do a clean re-install of a new version of linux mint. I installed it with a live usb drive.


When I restarted the computer after installation, Linux mint wouldn't load. Instead, I get an error after maybe 15 seconds saying "PXE-E61: Media test falure, check cable," preceded by a few other lines referencing Intel UNDI and some patents, returning to the boot menu after a second.


More interesting is when I try to boot a live USB stick with Debian on it. If I try to run it from the boot menu, it waits a few seconds, and then displays the same check cable error as before, and then returning to the boot menu. More interesting is that if I pull out the USB stick after I get to the boot menu, and then try to boot the USB stick, the exact same results occur. The results of trying to boot the USB seem to be independent of if the USB is plugged in or not. I know my live USB stick is good because I've tested it on other similar machines.


My BIOS is Pheonix SecureCore Tiano. People elsewhere say that it is very buggy, I suspect it may be part of the problem. I also re-partitioned my drive during installation of Linux Mint yesterday, making the main partition a little smaller and growing my boot partition by a few megabytes (the new version of mint wanted the boot partition to be at least 100mb to install, so I had to change it as mine was only 90mb). I don't know if this could be a part of the problem or not.


Also, I just threw an ancient windows XP installation CD into it, and it started loading windows setup. It encountered errors, though, and terminated. Any help would be appreciated.

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