A few weeks ago I tried out an Ubuntu installation, just to see if it met my requirements.
I have all I need on Win7 but being the adventurous type and already having tried and dismissed Win8 I thought I'd try Ubuntu.
My machine has 4 hard drives and one of them had shown up as not available and I couldn't format it with Win7 so in went Ubuntu to try and sort it out.
On installation (yeah I know I could have just used the live disc instead) it chose a drive that I presumed was one in my machine, but it appears that it was an external drive.
On reboot at completion of installation the monitor screen just didn't do anything. It didn't even show itself as being there, ie no ON light to the start button which normally goes blue at start-up.
Naturally there was no appearance of any of the start-up messages, booting display or anything. Just blank.
Leaving the machine, the hard drive activity light was still flickering away urgently for as long as I left it, but still no start up.
I tried several attempts to resolve this with suggestions from all sources. I made a startup repair disc and tried that. No good, still no appearance of anything on the monitor that could allow me to figure things out.
I inserted the Win7 disc to see if it would boot into that and allow me to to a repair. What actually happened is that it allowed the system to start into Win 7 and everything seems normal and the computer can run. However, the computer just won't start without the disc in. It seems to be booting into the system using the disc rather than what's on the hard drive.
I'm guessing it's looking for the GRUB menu which Ubuntu would have installed but can't find it so hangs and goes round and round searching for it.
I can't find any way to copy the necessary files over to windows on the hard drive and no means of doing a repair using the win7 disc as I just can't get into the startup menu on boot. I can't change any BIOS settings as I can't get to them.
What I have basically is a computer with a system that starts up if the Win7 disc is inserted but without any means of changing anything.
Oh, I tried doing a live drive repair from both Ubuntu and Knoppix but can't find anyway to remedy the situation in their system.
I have all I need on Win7 but being the adventurous type and already having tried and dismissed Win8 I thought I'd try Ubuntu.
My machine has 4 hard drives and one of them had shown up as not available and I couldn't format it with Win7 so in went Ubuntu to try and sort it out.
On installation (yeah I know I could have just used the live disc instead) it chose a drive that I presumed was one in my machine, but it appears that it was an external drive.
On reboot at completion of installation the monitor screen just didn't do anything. It didn't even show itself as being there, ie no ON light to the start button which normally goes blue at start-up.
Naturally there was no appearance of any of the start-up messages, booting display or anything. Just blank.
Leaving the machine, the hard drive activity light was still flickering away urgently for as long as I left it, but still no start up.
I tried several attempts to resolve this with suggestions from all sources. I made a startup repair disc and tried that. No good, still no appearance of anything on the monitor that could allow me to figure things out.
I inserted the Win7 disc to see if it would boot into that and allow me to to a repair. What actually happened is that it allowed the system to start into Win 7 and everything seems normal and the computer can run. However, the computer just won't start without the disc in. It seems to be booting into the system using the disc rather than what's on the hard drive.
I'm guessing it's looking for the GRUB menu which Ubuntu would have installed but can't find it so hangs and goes round and round searching for it.
I can't find any way to copy the necessary files over to windows on the hard drive and no means of doing a repair using the win7 disc as I just can't get into the startup menu on boot. I can't change any BIOS settings as I can't get to them.
What I have basically is a computer with a system that starts up if the Win7 disc is inserted but without any means of changing anything.
Oh, I tried doing a live drive repair from both Ubuntu and Knoppix but can't find anyway to remedy the situation in their system.