Now, I'm facing two problems with ubuntu on my Acer Aspire 5504. On my liveCD, the screen goes blank after the splash screen, and nothing loads, or so I think. Anyway, the screen is blank.

My second problem is with an external 30GB external HDD that I'm trying to install Ubuntu on. It currently has no partition structure, yet when I run ubuntu Live on another computer, it shows up as a locked partition, under GParted. Can anybody help me with this? Or is there any other partitioning software that is recommended? When I try SwissKnife in Windows, or Disk Management, it gives me an option to delete partition, yet when I try to create one, it says "Read/write error". It does not allow me to format it at all.

Did you check your external HDD? If you have the write switch off on it [write protect], it can produce the error.

I don't know. I could use it previously, until I foolishly used Partition Table Doctor 3's boot disk to clear the MBR as there was a boot sector virus. When I try to format it in Windows XP, it reaches 22% and cannot go further.

So can anybody find out what's wrong with my laptop? I can't get the liveCD to work, though i think it's just a display problem. My graphics card is an ATi Moblility Radeon X700 with 64MB dedicated VRAM. My laptop is widescreen 1280x800. Knoppix can work fine though.