please help

[shugo]

i had linuxmint running on my lenevo laptop, it was capable of booting from usb but i was just messing around with plop but the thing now is that i cannot boot any linuxmint there is no option in plop menu and i cannot run any live cd because it always ends up saying error about non capable of usb, but i am pretty sure that it is capable of booting from use by default because that is the way i had installed linuxmint on it. please help me, if possible how can access my linuxmint i don't mind data loss i just want to be able to use my laptop again. thanks in advance

[Elmar]

I assume you are using the Plop Boot Manager 5. This version is not able to boot USB CDROM. You have to use an USB thumb drive.

Maybe you used the BIOS to boot from the USB CDROM drive.

[shugo]

yes i am using plop boot manager 5, but no i don't have a cd-rom in my laptop ( by cd-rom i mean the thing in which you put cd/dvd please correct me if i am wrong )  i used usb thumb drive to load linux mint to my laptop, i changed boot order from bios and booted from usb thumb drive. the question is i was able to boot usb thumb drives with linuxmint iso before installing plop but now i see only black screen with blinking underscore, i have checked the error with blinking underscore but no its not a problem with the iso as i have previously booted my hard disk with the same iso.pls help

[Elmar]

You talked about live cd, so I thought you used an USB CDROM drive.


Test on another computer that booting from USB works with your thumb drive.


On your laptop press in the Plop Boot Manager Main Menu the key "q". Try the boot entries of that menu.
Also try the hotkey CTRL-SHIFT-U in the main menu of the boot manager.

[shugo]

I had used the same thumb drive to install Linux in that PC so the thumb drive definitely works . after pressing "q" key i got 1 option to boot mbr hda and other 16 option to choose from HDA,HDB,HDC,HDD all having 4 partition each. from HDA i found only partition 2 did NOT had "NO VALID BOOTSIGNATURE" and rest of them did, in HDB all 4 partition did not have valid bootsignature and i was not able to boot from any partition from HDC and HDD, it just hanged when i clicked on them. also when i clicked on mbr hda no change happened or it simply restarted. i also tried CTRL-SHIFT-U but it got "BOOT ERROR, NO BOOT DEVICE FOUND, PLEASE RETRY IT" after that it hanged.

[Elmar]

I had used the same thumb drive to install Linux in that PC so the thumb drive definitely works .

I don't know how often I heard that, and finally the thumb drive was not booting. So simply try it.

[shugo]

i was able to boot by trying a grub iso which enabled me to choose my mint (installed on hardisk) and from there i installed grub so now it works. thanks for your help