I have a new HP ProBook 4510s, which will probably not run Win 7 which came with it. (grin). So I figured I'd image the disk.

Clonezilla won't boot. I tried with several CDs.

Slax does boot. Ultimate boot CD boots.

Any ideas?

I know it's hard to provide error messages in this type of situation, but what else can you tell us? How far does it get? Any output? Any error messages?

It doesn't get far.

The optical drive spins. Pressing ESC for bios, to change boot device doesn't work.

On some attempts, the screen will go blank, but there is no progress indication.

Slax does boot, but there is a minor graphics rendering issue.

Ultimate boot CD also boots.

I tried clonezilla on both RW and R cds, and got the same behavior.

Same behavior in three laptops. And I've verified that my optical media works in other laptops and PCs.

Since the systems are new, I have HP support on the phone, but there's not much progress there. They want me to have a windows boot CD, which of course, I don't have. The system comes with win 7 installed.

It uses UEFI bios.

Knoppix does not boot (kernel panic)

BART will not boot.

Older version of GHOST will. Slax will. Slackware 13.0 DVD will.

Well, HP support has told me that they don't support booting of any discs other than windows. I'm still pushing, but it's looking like I'll be returning three laptops. I just wonder about the next vendor.

Just a random idea: have you tried switching the drive mode to IDE or AHCI?

I looked at that. My wife bought an i7 HP laptop. It seems there isn't support yet or at least a few months ago for that sata driver yet in many disto's.

If you can get any one to work then consider the old dd over ftp trick.

http://www.hubbardandhubbard.com/con...-an-ftp-server