Lenovo IdeaPad S12 not booting up

[johnnyaug]

Hi all,
I've been searching for a solution for hours, though nothing worked.
I tried to install OpenELEC on a partition, already having WinXP and Ubuntu 12.04 installed on other partitions. I've followed a guide for manual installation, at the end of which I copied a SYSTEM file into the partition. After rebooting, I saw a blinking cursor at the top left corner of the screen, and nothing else happens.
I tried booting from an ubuntu livestick, winXP recovery usb, gparted livestick - it all results in the same blinking cursor.

I also tried finding a file to recover the bios, but I couldn't.
Any ideas?

Thank you,
Johnny.

[DaveLembke]

I am thinking that if you didnt corrupt the 2 other partitions that Grub or other bootloader you are using is not configured correctly maybe. I am guessing that before this install you had grub or another bootloader that gave choice for which OS to boot and ever since this manual install now you have just a blinking cursor?

Did you play around with resizing any partitions to make room for the 3rd partition for this OpenELEC to be installed?

You should be able to boot off the Ubuntu 12.04 DVD and run the Linux Live environment and be able to fix the issue with bootloader, however if you cant get a Live Distro running than you may have a hardware failure.

[johnnyaug]

Thank you for your reply.

Indeed I configured grub and I may have done it wrong. However, as you said, I can't boot from the ubuntu live distro. Could I have corrupted the BIOS or something similar?

[DaveLembke]

Only way to corrupt the bios would be if it took a bad flash. This is something that has to be intentional. Its not something that is accidental from an OS install to a partition or playing with grub.

I'd make sure that the optical drive or usb pen drive is the first device to boot in the BIOS assuming you can still enter it to configure it, with this optical drive and or usb accepting bootable devices prior to any hard drives, so that if a bootable pen drive or disc is present it will boot if the system is still healthy hardware wise.