Hi,

A client has given me his old Acer Aspire 5715Z laptop to replace the rotten Windows XP by a clean Slackware Linux installation.

I can boot on a Slackware64 14.1 installation DVD OK, partition the hard disk, configure networking, fetch my personal set of tagfiles. But around halfway through the installation, in the middle of installing package group L, the screen goes black and the laptop seems to have turned itself off (yes, power cable is plugged). I tried again, and I got the same general failure at about the same point, in the middle of installing package group L.

Any idea what could be wrong here?

Does the laptop get hot, or produce a pungent odor like burning smell?

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I have a desktop monitor going bad that does the same thing. Could the screen itself be going bad? Can you hook it up to an external monitor? If so, does the same thing happen?

I checked, and it gets very hot at the rear ventilation indeed. I think I will have to take it apart and clean around the fan.

Thanks.

I've had that problem in the past installing on an old compaq laptop. I ended up manually installing the packages so I didn't have to start from the beginning every time. It died a few times along the way, and I would just pick up where I left off. Then once the packages were installed I went back into setup to finish the configuration. After slack was installed and up and running I did not have any more problems with the laptop.

Brian

If overheating was the cause your second attempt would have failed sooner than your first. I would be more inclined to suspect bad sectors on the disk.