PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Fault tracing with a bootable USB stick

17th Nov 2016, 12:19

#14 (permalink)

John Marsh

Join Date: Aug 2006

Location: UK

Posts: 181

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Received 16 Likes on 7 Posts

Progress

After much fiddling about, I have succeeded in booting this machine from a USB stick.

The setup: BIOS boot mode in Legacy Support. UEFI off. Fast Boot off. USB boot enabled.

With the machine off, insert USB stick. Then, press the Lenovo key. This is a tiny pinhole at the top left of the laptop base. I used a partially-straightened paper clip.

A menu appears. Select 'Boot Menu'. Select boot from USB.

Doing the above, I booted up Ubuntu from a multi-Linux USB stick. I selected 'Try Ubuntu', so as to avoid any usage of the hard drive. (Please tell me if I'm wrong here.)

After about 5 mins of exploration, the system froze whilst showing the Desktop.

From this, I deduce that the fault cannot be related to either Windows or the hard drive. FWIW, I have had some crashes in Win. 7 related to ntoskrnl and hal.dll. And some earlier ones like this in Windows 10.

During my fiddling about, I ran Memtest86+ from a bootable CD. Left it going for over 34 hours; no errors. I also removed & re-seated the RAM and the HDD.

So: it's a motherboard fault. Are there any hardware tests which could narrow it down?

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