Some background first. Last year I bought a cheap second-hand Samsung laptop which I call littleboy. I've been using it purely as a learning tool, having no previous experience of laptops at all. It currently has 64-bit NuTyX on it, and recently I have been trying to build LFS.

Yesterday I shut it down as usual. Nothing odd happened. Today it wouldn't boot.

There's a recovery mode option in the bios so I activated it (F4). This brought up a PXE which gave me the following messages:

PXE-E61 Media test failure, check cable
PXE-MOF Exiting PXE ROM
Operating system not found.

A brief google suggests that this usually indicates a fried disk, but most of those posts were about Windows, not Linux. I was able to boot from a pen drive that happened to have 32-bit AntiX on it. I could mount the two data partitions (sda2 and sda3) and list their root directories. I unmounted and fsck'd them and saw no errors.

To try to reinstall a bootloader, I would need a 64-bit rescue disc, which at the moment I have not got. The question is: is it worth the effort? If it's just a corruption in LILO, that's easily corrected, but if the disk really is going, the problems will just re-occur somewhere else. There is no valuable data on the drive, just the NuTyX OS and source files for LFS.

So I want to know: is this the sign of a disk that's going belly-up?

That particular error being from PXE means it couldn't find a PXE server to boot from on your network. Has nothing to do with the hard drive. Does not necessarily mean that the drive isn't going bad, just that particular error has nothing to do with the hard drive.

Do you have a onboard diagnostics boot?

There is a setting that makes the bios more verbose if that's what you mean. I've just tried using that and there's nothing sinister in the few messages that come up. It mentions finding a Samsung hard drive so it obviously has low-level access to the disk. The point about the PXE boot is that it does that because it can't boot from the hard drive.

The first few times I tried to boot it this morning, it printed out a lot of 999's instead of my LILO menu. Then I used F4 to put it into recovery mode and it printed "A disk read error occurred" and then went into PXE. Since then, it's been trying to use PXE on every boot.

No, PXE ignores the hard drive. PXE in the BIOS will boot to the NETWORK. PXE in the bios is configured only to boot from network, and you actually have to use some shenanigans to get it to boot to anything other than the network. I use PXE quite regularly, it was designed as a way to do network booting only, and by default will not even look at anything local to boot from.

I think we have slightly crossed wires here. The boot order as set in the BIOS is USB, hard drive, PXE. So it should not be using PXE at all if it can read boot code from the hard drive. Obviously it can't. The initial weird display that I got (see my previous post) must have been an attempt at a normal boot. Now it doesn't even try that.

OH, you're saying that it only gets to PXE because it fails booting from hard drive. GOTCHA. I thought you were saying the PXE error was failing to boot from hard drive.

It's possible something happened to the bootloader and so there's absolutely nothing wrong with the hard drive, but it's genuinely not bootable any longer. Best thing if you don't have true diagnostics in BIOS (a lot of boards still don't) is to boot from a live USB and run SMART (I'm guessing most live usb's have smart utilities, can't say I've ever actually thought to look) and a FSCK to see if the drive is ok. If both report no issues, you can try chrooting into your installation and try reinstalling your bootloader (make sure you have network access to look up instructions if you've never done this before).

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Usually Bios will show IDE drive make and model if it is not broken.

If it is broken. It will not show it <not present>

I am saying ide because even older bioses have this capability. I have changed enough hard drives to know this.

Does your bios see the hard drive make and model?

This is not in boot order by the way. But in system info somewhere.

Edit: My bad. I see that your usb drive sees the drive. So bios sees it also. Timothy Miller is on track with this thread.

This is what threw me off.

That usually means a dead drive or incorrect plug into the harness. Or a incorrect hard drive (some ide/sata ssd cards I have seen this happen)

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Yes, the verbose boot shows a Samsung HM160Ht.
Well, given the fact that it worked up to yesterday and I haven't changed anything internally, I think a corrupted bootloader is more likely than a cable fault. And, as Timothy pointed out, that message comes from PXE, which doesn't actually look at the local drives at all. It only checks the ethernet card, so the reference to checking the cable probably means "You're not plugged into the network, you doofus!"

I'm going to download and burn a new SystemRescue disc. My existing one is only 32-bit, but the modern version has a choice of 32-bit and 64-bit kernels so I'll be able to chroot across into NuTyX and try to fix the bootloader. I've done that before; I had to do it for AntiX because the installer failed initially to install GRUB (they've fixed that now btw).

Anyway, it's not that urgent. Like I said before, that machine is more of a toy than a serious working computer. But I would like to get it working again.

I'd be thinking more along the lines of a bad hardware. Bootloaders won't load and then fall back to pxe usually.

The only way to find out for sure is to try to reinstall the bootloader. If that doesn't make it bootable, then it's hardware. In which case, I don't want to spend good money on fixing it. I'll just have to conclude that I have no luck with laptops. This will be the second one that broke on me (last time it was the keyboard).

Of course that's what happens when you buy cheap, second-hand laptops. If I were to buy a new one, no doubt it would be more reliable, and it would also be worth fixing if it went wrong, but why should I spend a couple of hundred pounds on buying something I don't really need? I have a good, sturdy, functioning desktop machine. It's also second-hand but so far it's never caused me any problems.

Why not get both (assuming it also is available in the UK)?

Price of used, but brand new. WHile it's no powerhouse, it's adequate and has a FANTASTIC 1080P LCD. Only possible downfall is if it's not sold there.

Throwing Boot Repair Disk (https://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair-cd/home/Home/) at it might be worth a go.

Run hard drive diags on it. Ultimate boot cd has generic tests. Best to run OEM diags on hard drive and see what it says.

Memtest never hurts either.

I used a new up-to-date SystemRescue image on a usb key to boot and install lilo in the /dev/sda mbr. Now the thing boots from the hard drive again.

Of course that doesn't tell me if I've fixed the problem (i.e. the bootloader corruption was just one-off bad luck) or merely cured a symptom. If the latter, there may be more corruption later on. I must say that I've never before known a bootloader go bad except when it was being updated; after all, this code is normally only read, not modified.

I'm going to mark this thread provisionally as solved. Meanwhile I'll collect a few diagnostic tools for future use. At present I haven't even got memtest on that machine.

I have boot problems hazel when improper shutdowns happened on my laptop.

Only difference. I was using Ext2 file system on EEEPC and needed to do a

Which I did with gparted in a AntiX live session with the umount/check option with right click in gparted.

But seeing you already did that and it sounds like a corrupted mbr boot loader.

I am just wondering if a improper shutdown. Like battery going dead while running or battery is no good and laptop died from inadvertently unplugging the power adapter unit causing instant shutdown?

If either one of those scenarios. They could be a cause I think for those kind of symptoms. Though I know you said you shut down normal like in your opening post.