Tag Archives: hp

How to repair the Partition Table of my Laptop?

Posted on April 5, 2012 by admin| 3 Comments

I have a HP DV9500 Laptop. I have 2 HDDs on it, but I can only boot from one.
I have Windows Vista on it. The initial partition table was something like that:
~140 GB – WIndows Vista
~8 GB – Recovery Partition

I split the 140 GB partition in 2 with the Kubuntu 7.10 partitioner. There was enough free space on that partition. I then proceeded with the instalation of Kubuntu. When Grub was installed it didn’t detect Vista. The problem is that Kubuntu doesn’t start-up and when I manually boot Vista it stucks at boot. It doesn’t boot from the Recovery DVD either…
Somebody suggested that the Partition Table is broken. I don’t have a physical bad on my HDDs, so the question is: How do I repair the partition table?
P.S.: I have access to my HDDs via Back|Track Linux Live CD. I can also access the terminal. Can I repair the PT with fdisk?(and how)

Thanks in advance.

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Need help installing Linux Ubuntu on HP Vista Laptop?

Posted on February 1, 2012 by admin| 7 Comments

I’m trying to set up a dual boot system on my HP pavilion dv6000 laptop running Windows Vista, but when I try to load the live CD, after i click “Run or install Ubuntu 7.10″ it prints out this list, then near the bottom it says something like “no such file or directory” about 4 to 6 times.
I obviously have “boot from cd” enabled, is there anything else? HELP?!?!?!
Yes, I have partitioned my hard drive, but it still doesn’t work. I’ll try that F6 thing but i dunno…

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Problems with Compaq Presario c300 laptop?

Posted on December 26, 2011 by admin| 1 Comment

My girlfriend’s laptop has been experiencing some issues. It BSoD’d her, crashed, and kept auto-restarting to the boot choices menu. No matter what option was picked, it would just auto-restart to the menu after the Windows splash screen. She doesn’t have an XP cd, since they don’t usually come with HP laptops. We tried the built in recovery, but it crashed in the middle of repartitioning the hard drive, and now each time it is booted up, it can get to BIOS and boot settings, but after that, the error message that Windows root/system32@/hal.dll is corrupted or missing and needs replaced. Well, we can’t do much to it without the XP cd. Almost every solution online requires the disc. No other machine to hook it up to. No extra hd. Any help or ideas? I thought about recovery LiveCD’s and smaller Linux distros/utilities, but since I don’t live close by, I need something she can learn to do on her own(she isn’t very computer savvy).

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Damn Small Linux and an HP Pavillion 6735?

Posted on December 2, 2011 by admin| 1 Comment

I started playing around with an old HP Pavilion 6735 and damn small linux. I tried to boot it up from the live CD as normal, it said “undefined mode number” so I just pressed space to skip, it started up but the graphics were all distorted and grainy.

Then I rebooted and used the boot cheat code: dsl 2
When it got to the terminal, I typed in: Xvesa -listmodes
The 2 best resolutions and color depths I got were: 800x600x16 and 1024x768x8
8 bit color depth is a little low, so I rebooted and used a cheatcode to boot it into 800x600x16. Everything went fine and the colors were perfect

My question is:
Is the reason the colors get distorted on default boot-up (1024x768x24) because my computer’s GPU can’t handle that resolution and color depth?
why doesn’t anyone answer when the question has to do with damn small linux?

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For Linux users: What open source OS would you recommend?

Posted on November 22, 2011 by admin| 3 Comments

I want to try a Linux based OS on my machine as dual boot system w/ Windows Vista. Found lots of info in net, tried Ubuntu Live CD (without install), however cannot decide which OS will be the best for me. I’m not experienced w/ Linux and just want to try open source soft. I researched all of these distributions http://www.linux.com/distributions/ Is out there something else I don’t know about? Also the question is which distribution will work the best on my machine which is HP Pavillion dv9420us, see http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/product_detail.do?storeName=computer_store&landing=computers&category=notebooks/dv9000z_series&subcat1=rts&catLevel=3&product_code=GA354UA%23ABA&tab=detailed_specs#defaultAnchor Thanks!
Can I try other OS without installing them (like Ubuntu)?

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