On Mon, 2011-10-17 at 17:44 +0100, David Goldsbrough wrote: > Hi, > > Up until Friday I was happily runnng Ubuntu on subject machine. It > has never managed to do a restore before, and I have always shutdown > and re-booted whenever softaware updates requested it. > > I have never tried ever to suspend it or hibernate it, due to bad > attitude on my part as I regard this function as "fancy-dan stuff". I > also suspected it would never be able to cope on the basis that if > "restart" never worked then suspend or hibernate never would either. > > On Friday though my "wisdom" got the better of me and I tried to > suspend it. Boy, did it sulk. It just went dead! Any attempts to > re-boot it results in an error message "BIOS(Block3) is damaged! (call > user serviceman.) Serviceman: Place maintenance disk in drive and > press any key when ready." > > I have spent the weekend on and off researching the net and trying a > few things. It would seem that I am unable to access the BIOS at boot > time. Pressing F2 is the normal access method but I have tried the > ESC key and the left-shift key. The DVD drive is not accessible and > there is no floppy drive. I do have a usb read-only floppy drive > available but I suspect the usb ports are not operable either. > > I did see some reference to getting a boot floppy and altering some of > the bytes with a hex editor which somehow fooled the BIOS and then > allowed the BIOS to be flashed. I never pursued this solution as I > could not think (or did not have the means) of achieving. I also had > some doubt whether it would work. I could find nobody who had > actually really fully solved the BIOS error. > > The machine cost me less than £50 some years ago, but I loved it so > much! It was my Ubuntu/linux learning platform. Is it time for the > scrap heap? > > DaveG >
Dave, You have my sympathies. Exactly the same thing happened to me a couple of years ago when my first Ubuntu laptop, also a second hand Toshiba, failed. My son shut the lid without shutting it down first. It tried to hibernate and never worked again! The machine had a floppy drive so I even tried the official Toshiba BIOS repair floppy image from their web site, but nothing worked. I think you are looking at a new machine. Barry T -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
