i have been struggling with installing Linux on my laptop, but have had at least some success. I finally got a bigger hdd for my tower, and am trying to get Linux on it as well. I have a disc wallet t of around 20 distributions, and not a single one of them will boot at all on my tower.
when i put in any Linux live cd or dvd (i have not tried an installer), it always reads the disc and i see the initial screen, but when i attempt to actually boot into the distribution, it completely freezes when it comes to hdc.

my tower is
-an MSI 865pe neo 2-v motherboard with a pentium 4 processor (3.0 ghz),
-a 200 gb MAXTOR STM3200820A hdd (IDE) (i had the same problem with my old hdd, which was sata)
-an LG 16x DVD RW drive (if the model number is needed i can get it)
-an NVidia geforce 6600 (i think... i can't remember, and i can't read anything on it) it is a geforce though
-an ati tv wonder tv tuner pci card

the distros i've tried are:
knoppix 4.0 dvd, bintoo 2007.1, ubuntu 6.12, Ulteo-kde, freespire 1.0.13, suse 10.1, simply mepis 6.0, linspire live, ubuntu ultimate 1.0, myah OS 2.1, Gentoo 2006, mandriva one free 2007 (the kde and gnome discs) sabayon 3.2, xubuntu 6.10, kubuntu, slackware 11.0, accellerated knoppix, pclinuxos myth edition, simply mepis 3.3 and dyne:bolic

i have been trying for months to get everything working on my laptop and really was hoping it was going to be easier on the tower!

hopefully it's something obvious i've missed, i poked around the bios setup looking for obvious solutions, but didn't really know what to look for

any help would be great
thanks
benjamin

What sort of device is hdc? This should be the 2nd IDE Master.

Is any error displayed?

Ubuntu normally has excellent hardware detection. If you are having problems, get the Alternate Install CD. This is a text based install, rather than the LiveCD. Come to that - does the Ubuntu desktop LiveCD work? Does it boot up to a graphical interface?

I can't see anything particularly exotic about that hardware - so Linux should have no problems. It could be your CD burner. Make sure that you burn the CD at a very low speed, and check the MD5SUM of the ISO file that you download. If possible, maybe borrow another CD drive, and use that.

--Ian

How far into the booting process do you get?
Is the system freezing up or is it just the screen goes blank?
Are you seeing any of the start up processes loading?
Did you make the boot disks from ISO or did you copy the ISO straight to disk?

hello
i know the discs themselves work, because they're the same ones i used on my laptop, i always burn at the lowest setting possible, and i burned the iso's to disc with alcohol 120%

it freezes up after i get an inital screen or two, that is, during the progress bar that often appears (depending on the distro) or in verbose mode it always freezes when it comes to hdc

when i try an ubuntu live cd (i just tried ubuntu ultimate dvd 1.0 a minute ago) it eventually abandons the graphical progress bar and pops up with a bunch of text which says [17179821.456000] hdc: cdrom_pc_intr: the drive appears confused

so i tried switching my dvdrw drive to slave and plugging it in on the same ide cable as the hdd, and now the message described in my last post says "hdb: cdrom_pc_intr: The drive appears confused
so i guess there is a problem with my disc drive.. i don't have any others i could use to test though...
any ideas?

edit: the "cable select" jumper position yields the same result as "slave"

Have you tried it booting from a USB device? Nearly all the LiveCD info I see claim to be able to run from a USB drive.

not a bad idea,
i will have to look into it,
hopefully it won't still have problems with my disc drive, because it really is important that i have optical storage

thanks
benjamin

has anyone had any problems with LG dvd-rw drives before?

so, after popping a different DVD drive in my tower and double checking that it works in the bios and in windows, i tried booting up a few distros again and have had the same problem i described before.

it would seem to me then, that the problem is somewhere in my motherboard. perhaps something i can configure in the bios?

i would really appreciate any help with this...

thanks
benjamin

ps i tried booting a freebsd cd, and got all the way to the end of the installation, so i figure it didn't have a problem... if that helps any

sorry to reply to my own post, but every day i want windows off of my machine more and more!

does anyone know of anything i can do to get the cds to boot?

is it possible that some processors or motherboards or something are simply incompatible with linux?

is there any suggestions out there as to other places to look to solve this problem?

any help is greatly appreciated

benjamin

boy, do i feel stupid!

it was a combination of jumper and bios settings that i had to fiddle around with extensively before getting anything to work
but once i did...
o man!

i booted up sabayon linux and turned on desktop acceleration...
beryl is awesome!

it's a little busy at first, but once you get things toned down a bit (smaller and less icons, less clutter and smaller taskbars etc) it's completely awesome.
I couldn't stop smiling when i started playing around with moving the windows and things around. fantastic!

I have only a minor issue with my second monitor not working but i will figure that out soon enough (i'm not sure how it will affect the desktop switching, but we'll see)

my first true success story after 6 months!