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 -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
