Lenovo laptop Z585 won't boot linux

[joeymac]

WARNING

I bought a Lenovo z585. After setting up Windows 7 on it, I removed the drive and installed the drive from my defunct laptop.

It absolutely refuses to boot any distribution of linux (including fedora16/17). With a DVD or memory stick, it shows the graphical grub menu, but after selection it diddles forever with a underline cursor blinking in the upper left corner of the screen.

Disabling or enabling efi boot enable in the bios has no effect.

I suspect that the "secure boot" is the culprit, but I don't know for sure until I reach Lenovo Tech Support.

Be Warned!

[nonamedotc]

Are you sure that if it is secure boot, it will let windows 7 boot? I was under the impression that earlier versions of windows will also have problems when secure boot is implemented.

I suspect that something else (not sure what could be) might be the problem here .... Just a thought ...

[joeymac]

I was wrong; secure boot was not the problem.

By chance, I entered acpi=off as a kernel boot parameter and got gentoo to boot. I then tried the same with fedora, and it booted with some stuttering.

I'm doing further research on the very old: mp-bios-bug-8254-timer-not-connected-use-noapic bug/diagnostic that I am seeing.

[mirrordin]

Sorry, I'm not very experimented on linux, I bought the same laptop as you and I want to install Ubuntu or fedora but i don't know how enter on boot without enter on the operative system. Can you explain detailled how you install linux with sucess. Thanks

[joeymac]

Sorry for the delay in replying.

I am not sure what you mean, but I think that you don't know how to get started. If I am mistaken, please forgive my mistake.

First you have to get a CD, DVD, or USB memory stick with the operating system written on it. If you don't have this, then go to distrowatch.com and download the version of linux you want. You can do this with Windows or other operating system.

Write the downloaded file to a CD or DVD <i>as an ISO file (not as a regular file).

Boot from the created CD/DVD and follow instructions. Fedora 18 and Suse-12.3 should boot without problems.

There are things that I skipped, but should be obvious to you when you get started.

[stevea]

I did think highly of IBM laptops & such.
Then that had some carryover effect wrt Lenovo.
I can't say I'd never buy another Lenovo, but my opinion of the company & products has dropped.