am I experiencing a hardware failure?

[ptoche]

I had been using my new (two months old) laptop for about 15 minutes when it suddenly crashed. No overheating whatsoever involved. I think I might have made an update following a suggestion in the tray, but this may have been yesterday, in my current emotional state I'm not sure I can recollect anything clearly. Anyways, it crashed. Upon restart, an error message like this (approximate rendering):

ASIX AX88772B UNDI 1.0.400 beta 4 PXE-2.0 (Build 0.83)
Enumerating for ASIX USB DONGLE ...
No ASIX USB Dongle found.
PXE-M0F Exiting Intel PXE ROM.
Reboot and Select Proper Boot Device.

So I went back home, got the live-cd out of a box (wishing I had made a recovery USB flashdrive as I'd intended to, to have with me at all times). Back home I ran the 2 disk checks that are listed in the main menu. They exited without any errors. Then I started Kubuntu from the (external) DVD device fully intending to find out what had happened. In the past I'd been able to visit the disk, check the content of the grub, replace it by a copy that had worked before, that sort of thing. However, I can't "see" the hard drive when I go into /media all I see there is the cdrom. If I launch Dolphin, likewise, I don't "see" the hard drive. It's not mounted. But is it even there?

[EDIT: deleted my experience with commands that pertain to grub and not grub2, replaced it with an attempt to use grub2, below]

The guide (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2) says
The following commands will help determine this information: set, ls, ls (hdX,Y)/, ls (hdX,Y)/boot, ls (hdX,Y)/boot/grub, but this throws up:

Error 27: Unrecognized command

My question is a simple one: what's a quick way to find out if it's a hardware failure? And if it's not, then how can I do a recovery?

Many thanks!

[dibl]

Re: am I experincing a hardware failure?

It appears that it crashed in session that had been booted from a USB device -- is that right? So when you restarted it tried to reboot that USB device, didn't find it, and put up the error message?

So, get into your BIOS and take a look at "boot devices" and "boot device sequence", and set them to reflect whatever you need to boot next (hard drive, perhaps).

I can't tell from this much, whether there is any hardware problem or not. Booting from Live CD, you can learn what hardware is present on the computer with commands such as:

lspci -vv

lsusb

lscpu

sudo blkid

(for hard disk drives/SSDs)

but those don't necessarily prove that the listed devices are working correctly, just that the system is aware of them at boot time.

[ptoche]

Re: am I experincing a hardware failure?

Thanks dibl,

I'm so sorry my explanations were unclear.

I had booted normally with the grub into Kubuntu and was checking email in Thunderbird when the crash occurred. No usb flashdrive was plugged in at the time. I don't have an internal DVD player.

I did go into the BIOS to check the boot options, and the only listed device was, what do you call it, the thingy card, but no hard drive listed there. And again no hard drive listed when I booted into the Kubuntu CD or when I launched Dolphin from that cd boot. At this point, neither the BIOS nor the Kubuntu CD can see the hard drive.

I hope this is clearer. Thanks for your timely reply.

[dibl]

Re: am I experincing a hardware failure?

no hard drive listed there.

If there's no hard drive listed in BIOS, then yes, you've got a hardware problem. Check the connections (you'll have to open the back of the laptop, per the user manual) -- there is a small but real possibility that it simply got disconnected.

But more likely the drive broke.

And if it's only 2 months old, perhaps it's still under warranty? If so, then don't open it -- just contact the manufacturer and get a RMA number and send it back for repair.

[ptoche]

Re: am I experincing a hardware failure?

Thanks dibl,

That's right, the SSD doesn't show in the BIOS at all. Oh what a nightmare. This is the fourth hard disk failure in two years... I'll take it to Lenovo tomorrow. I just worry about how long it will take to fix this. This is right at the beginning of the Chinese new year (I'm in Hong Kong)...

Patrick.

Addendum: And now it won't even let me go into the BIOS !