Lets see ive made boot cds of mandriva, gOS. ubuntu, opensuse and puppylinux, slax and some others. the only ones that have booted were puppy linux and opensuse 10.3. i tried to boot open suse 10.3 again since it worked before but it doesnt anymore. they all seem to be stuck at the initramfs or couldnt mount a drive, and find initramfs.

i have a asus a8v mobo, amd x64, with 1 sata dvd drive, and a samsung sata drive.

are there any other distros that i should try? is it a bios problem? my dvd drive is set as master, and my hd as a slave. could this be the problem?

Welcome to LQ!!

This does not sound like something that will be helped by trying different distros.....

First, you don't say if you have actually installed any of the versions--or if you are simply running from Live CD (DVD).

Second, how much RAM and what size hard drive? If you are trying to run live CD/DVD distros without enough RAM, it could be an unhappy situation.

Stick with one of the mainstream distros--ie Ubuntu (or Mint), Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Fedora--and let's figure out how to get things working consistently.

yes im trying to run of the live cd first.

ive got 1 gb of ram and my hd is 160 gbs.

ill stick with ubuntu.so when i boot up with the ubuntu 8.10 32 bit edition live cd it gets stuck at <initramfs>, and tells me to type "help" to see options. any ideas?

Ubuntu is reportedly beginner-friendly, but it was not the easiest distro to install on my hardware. Not difficult, but not the easiest.

On my hardware, the "ease of install" prize went to - now get this - Slackware. Go figure. Slackware is a distro that has a reputation of being far LESS beginner friendly than Ubuntu (an undeserved reputation IMHO). Next up in the ease of install department was Debian followed by Fedora. Ubuntu and OpenSuse rounded out the bottom of the heap.

I am well experienced with Linux and all things Unix, so I really didn't have any significant problems installing any of these. However, a beginner might. I based my "ease of install" ratings on how easily I understood the installer questions, who well it detected my hardware, would it easily let me do what I wanted (install onto existing LVM, etc.), how well the initial boot went (did I have to grab a virtual terminal and twiddle with Xorg configuration?) etc. OpenSuse installed OK, but I had to wait forever for it to finish. I almost aborted that installation out of boredom. Then waiting for it to boot the first time, I almost aborted out of that too. Again, the boredom of waiting too long.

Of the LiveCD's (booted as a LiveCD and not an installer) the ease of use prize goes to SysRescueCD (but that boots to commandline by default, and that might befuddle a beginner). Knoppix LiveCD really doesn't keep up to date anymore these days, so it failed on some of my hardware.

Different Linux experience levels and different hardware configurations will certainly make for different installation experiences.

Installation is a big part of your initial Linux experience. But it's not the only part. You need to be able to USE the distro after you install it. Because I'm an old Unix geek, I love Slackware (and also Debian). But for a new Linux user the most oft-seen recommendation is probably Ubuntu. Because everything is point and click and highly automated (like Windows). Nothing wrong with a Ubuntu recommendation for a beginner. That's what I installed on my 80 year old parent's computer (they love it!) Ubuntu is also fine for experienced users too.

Slow down your burn speed to the slowest setting.

I'm not sure how haertig's advice addresses your specific issue.

The advice about burning slower presumes that your issue relates to something being wrong with the CD or DVD. That potentially fits the symptoms, and is worth a try. (Blank CDs are cheap)

Other things to look at:

1. Do you get the same symptoms with multiple attempts with the same CD?

2. Has the computer (and CD drive) been cleaned recently?

Different distros use different kernels/drivers. A change of distro/version CAN make a difference at install based on the specific hardware in your system. I tried to install Ubuntu 8.04 on my parents new Dell computer and I kept getting dropped into Busybox - same as the OP - couldn't load initramfs. Ubuntu 8.10 did not exhibit this behavior. Depending on your level of experience, you may want to try and debug the problems, or simply try a different distro. The OP asked if there were other distros to try ... I just gave my experiences/opinions for that question. There certainly could be other causes, like burn speed on the DVD as you are pursuing. Or it could be that the distros tried just don't recognize the OP's hardware correctly, especially if the system is a newly purchased one with some newfangled chipset on the mobo.

i dont think its the cds since ive tried these CDs on my laptop and they boot up fine. also it hangs at the same spot when using unetbootin with a USB flash drive.

so when i try to boot ubuntu it gets stuck on this:

(intramfs) [71.540014] ata5: SRST Failed (errno =-16)

what does this mean


**edit**

alright ive figured it out after some tinkering. i used the open suse 10.3 kde cd.

my sata dvd drive isnt compatible for some reason so i just used my IDE drive.

and i also put pci=nomsi in the boot options.

i dont know if both were needed to work but yea there you go.