Made a backup of Windows restore partition on an external drive.
Inserted opensuse 12.2 dvd and installed linux on the whole disk (got rid of windows)
Booted fine (used grub2-efi while installing, btw, else it wont boot from hdd after installation)
Installed nvidia drivers from 1 click option
did nvidia-xconfig as root and rebooted
X did not start on reboot. So read some stuff here and there and did a ‘zyper up’ from runlevel3
REBOOTED
Everything is gone: I turn on the laptop, nothing happens, not even ASUS splash screen, F", escape F12, nothing works to reach even bios… Basically I am not able to do anything now.
Guys, If anyone has any suggestions as to what might have happened and what I should try… please reply!
First try to determine at what level is the problem. Does the computer start at all (any lights?), is it a problem with the hardware? Can you see some ASUS welcome screen?
Can you boot using some boot medium and access your partitions? If not, the problem is with the disk, but if you can then it’s probably just booting.
Thanks for the input both of you above, but the problem is worse… I cannot even get a working screen like BIOS. Its all black. I have tried all key combinations like F2, F12, ESC, etc., to enter their. Nothing works. Trying to have a bootable LINUX CD or anything like that also doesn’t help. There is no ASUS splash screen/ welcom screen either.
Like @joaocgreis suggested, I am going to remove the HDD and try booting only with cd and see if I can get something…
Thanks again both of you for suggestions. I will appreciate if more people could spare some words from past experience.
Very sorry to report that yours is not a software issue. Even a quality company like ASUS is not immune from an occasional hardware failure. One thing to try before initiating an RMA process: unplug the AC adapter and remove the battery, then let the PC sit for a bit before trying again. That does actually work sometimes, not often, but it’s worth trying (one of the only two PCs I’ve ever successfully used that technique on was a very similar ASUS laptop).
I was trying not to touch my ‘dead’ laptop until I finish an important work (not related here) but the above posts incited me to resurrect it somehow… So here is what I did… Took out the HDD and booted… LO and behold, the BIOS showed up, so the HDD was after all the only culprit. I put the HDD in an external case, formatted it by connecting to a diff computer, plugged it back in and again restarted… It started this time again and now I have an opensuse dvd inside reinstalling the system (thankflly the laptop is new and i have 0 files to backup inside that HDD so I can afford this)… At the moment it is getting installed… let’s see what happens next… But the mystery remains… what the **** did ‘zypper up’ do to the HDD?
Sorry if this sounds argumentative, but there’s nothing, absolutely nothing that software on the hard drive can do to prevent the BIOS from being initialized, at a point in time when the hard drive likely hadn’t even been detected yet, and certainly hadn’t begun to read anything that had or had not been changed by zypper or anything else.
I’ve struggled over the years to come up with an explanation for this sort of problem. I don’t have any reliable diagnosis for you, just an informed guess. Perhaps there was a temporary problem with some piece of hardware that prevented boot. My hunch is we’re talking about a static buildup in a component, and that static was likely discharged during your removal and re-installation of your HDD. We’ll never know for sure.
Now, what does this mean for the future reliability of your PC? In theory this episode not a good sign, but my own experience is that I’ve had similar experiences half a dozen times over the years, and I’ve not yet seen one re-occur.
The ASUS I mentioned in my previous post failed shortly after purchase and nothing, absolutely nothing I did would resolve it. It was a week before I could get back to Best Buy to exchange it. I had to fly there from our island. and I had traveled with the battery out. When the Tech at Best Buy put the battery in and turned the computer on it booted right up. (I sure felt foolish that day.) That was six months ago and it’s still working fine.
Good Luck
Hi That is absolutely right and I have been pondering over the same thing… how on earth can a software prevent bios from being initialized! So I think I might have the answer now… The whole mess is created by this new UEFI Bios and the last time i zyppered up, my boot manger got changed somewhow to grub from grub2-efi which apparently made my laptop slip into a coma. This is my diagnosis. Now I reinstalled with an ‘elilo’ boot manager and hope this time things will be right… atleast i logged in for the first time after installing…
Just a thought… your symptoms were not unlike the behavior one used to see in the old days when one end of an IDE drive cable got plugged in upside down. In that case the HDD controller would prevent the BIOS from initializing until the offending cable was unplugged and reconnected correctly. Perhaps in your case one of the software updates resulted in an HDD controller becoming corrupted in some way that resolved during the process of removing and re-installing the HDD. Is that even possible? I don’t know.
I don’t have any very profound insights I’m trying to outline here… just sharing some random thoughts.