Hullo,

I've been meaning to try Linux for a good two years now, and finally got to the point where I will install it, and stick with it, and nothing else but it, for a month.

I decided to go with Arch, because I'm a minimalistic kind of guy, don't mind getting my hands dirty, and a few other reasons. So, I got a copy of the "release" version, arch-0.7.2-base.iso, I believe the same as the most recent stable edition from the nethat FTP.

I burned it as an image onto a CD-R, popped it into my CD-ROM drive and rebooted my computer. It came up, I hit enter to boot, it was successful so far. Then I got to the menu screens, where I did the easy part, and just erased my harddrive. Then I selected the base installation from the CD, installed it, seemed fine. I then installed the kernel and boot loader (GRUB) and everything seemed ok.

I type in reboot as it says, it reboots, the first screen pops up, where it says Gateway, Intel Inside, and press F10 for this, and F2 for that. It stayed like that for 5 or so minutes, so I restart. Same thing, restart again. Try to press F10 and F2, nothing. Restart again, same thing. Kept it like that, thinking it was a little laggy and had to do something. It's been on that screen for a good hour and a half now.

since you're not even getting to grub, it sounds more like a bios issue. did you change anything to boot from CD for the install?

Yes, the first option is to boot from CD, then from hard drive.

Problem is, I've done this before, and if there's nothing in the CD ROM, it should go to the hard drive, unfortunatly it doesn't go to hard drive or CD, and I can't access BIOS, it seems to freeze as soon as it hits the first boot screen, because I can't hit any of the buttons, F2 and F10 for BIOS and Boot options.

did you install the bootloader to the MBR? are you able to boot the system from the install disk, to at least verify that it boots? i would try that, and then maybe reinstalling grub making sure it's on the MBR. i think there are instructions in the wiki for how to do that.


p.s. what did you have on the computer before this? were there any problems? is it IDE or SATA hard drive? any other unusual/problematic hardware? are you overclocking? it wouldn't hurt to list any detail you can about your hardware. thx.

But I can't get that far.

I had Windows 2000 on it before. I did get some new spyware/adware, because I was getting some annoying pop ups. Don't know if it's IDE or SATA, not overclocking. The hardware is normal stock from Gateway, onboard intel graphics card, 256MB of RAM, 2.4 GHZ, USB keyboard, PS2 mouse.

oops, sorry, right you're not even getting to the point of the cdrom booting. maybe you have some sort of bios virus or something from running windoze. (?) it's all i can think of, sorry. if it's possible to reset the CMOS (should be a jumper on the motherboard somewhere), i would try that to reset the bios to default values (or do it manually if you can get into the bios), or set the option to do the boot virus scan if it has one (though be aware it could read the linux bootloader as a virus, giving a false positive). sounds like your bios might be flaking out, or possibly your PSU, video freeze up, or some other hardware failure. i just don't see how it can be OS related if it's not even getting past the boot screen.

Erk ...
Does it boot from a CD ???.

Wonder if the Gateway requires a vendor partition first ???. Normally if you had damaged the MBR loader code, the BIOS should whinge about no operating system - wonder if yours is looking for specific code.
*VERY* unlikely, just clutching at straws.

If you can boot something like Knoppix, enter the following command in a terminal session, and post the result so we can see what the MBR looks like nowDo a "fdisk -l" (that's a lower case L - no quotes), and use what it returns in the command above - may be /dev/hda or /dev/sda

I cleared the CMOS by moving the jumper, but no visible effect. I unhooked my hard-drive and it ran perfectly fine, or atleast how it should without a hard-drive. I guess I'll have to buy me a new hard-drive, cheaper to pay $45ish for a new hard drive, then $100 for geek squad.

that sucks, man, sounds like your hard drive is bad. do you have a floppy drive? you might be able to run diagnostic software from the manufacturer to see if it really is bad (if you can even boot a floppy). it's a longshot, but i guess it's also possible it's the cable or IDE ports on the motherboard. you might switch the HD cable with the CD drive to rule that out at least.

It's funny, I had the exact same issue as Adamski after installing Arch on my 6-year old Dell that had been lying dormant for several months. It turned out to be the HD cable--I had stored the comp on its side and the OEM cable was horribly kinked to start with. Hopefully this will solve the problem.

Arch is an excellent way to dive right in to get your feet wet with Linux--minimal, bleeding edge, sensibly-configured, has a good Wiki. Forum is helpful but pretty snobby/nasty at times. Be aware that once you get this problem solved you will probably need to edit your GRUB config--Arch doesn't auto-generate one--you'll have to point it to the correct initrd location among other things.