Hi—Opensuse 11.4 on an hp laptop. Suddenly when I turn the thing on all I get is a flashing _ no boot or anything. At first I thought it was a hard drive failure but I did a diagnostic test on the hard drive and it seems to be working fine.
So what should I do from here? I have a really nice photo archive on that laptop that I would like to keep.
I burned an ISO of the latest opensuse 12.1. The DVD booted up no problem…I selected the “Rescue” option…at first I wasn’t sure what to do there but eventually typed admin and got to a bash prompt but I have no idea what to do there.
Any assistance would be welcome. I’m a definite linux noob.
Should I just install opensuse 12.1 over the 11.4? Will it keep all my photo archive/users etc?
Better first try to find out what is wrong all of a sudden before going for something.
When you turn the “thing” on, all you get is flashing. When I do turn my HP desktop on, what I get is an HP splash screen with possibilities to go to the BIOS, or to rescue, etc. Do I understand correct that you do not get that? Then how do you get into booting a CD/DVD?
you are correct-- when the thing is turned on I get the flash screen with options for bios etc. forgot to mention that. that stuff happens first before the flashing _
I did not put /home and / on spearate partitions. Is it possible when installing 12.1 that I could keep the /home on teh one partition and then put 12.1 on a new partition? I’m assuming when you say / that means the OS?
Are you now sure you told it exactly? Sorry for my mistrust, but it was correct, wasn’t it? So after the HP-BIOS splash, one normaly gets the Grub flash with menu to choose what to boot. (there may be very short a black screen with a short line telling about GRUB before that). Now is it correct, you do not get the Grub screen?
(And please, do not say something like: “Oh yes, I see Grub, but it is after that”, tell exactly what you see, do, etc. because we can not look over your shoulder and are not clairvoyant).
All I get is HP BIOS Splash…then the blinking _ That is it. No Grub.
One additional thing I tried was I loaded the opensuse 12.1 DVD and went to the install and selected “update” It then did show all of 11.4 was still on the C drive. I have not been able to access the C drive to see what is there though beyond that. I tried loading DSL 4.2 I think but it could not find the knoppix file system. What reliable linux system that loads into RAM should I try to try to back up my files onto a usb drive? ALl i really need are photo files and text documenst for my kids’ school projects etc.