Feisty won't boot on a HP Pavilion dv6000 (AMD Turion 64x2) after fresh install
 

Hi people, my friend brought me her HP Pavilion dv6000 because she wanted to install linux in it, so I decided to install Ubuntu Feisty 64 bits (it's an AMD Turion 64x2). I picked up a Ubuntu Feisty alternate cd for 64 bits and did the installation as usual (no problems during installation, it was perfectly clean). The problem is, when I try to boot ubuntu after the installation, it hangs at the beggining of the bootup process. So I reset the machine and started on recovery mode, and the first time it got hung up at the following stage "setting up console font and keymap"... I reset the laptop again and the next time it got hung up at the message that says "loading hardware drivers". So I reinstalled Feisty again and managed to start in recovery mode, so I ran 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' in order to install the newest kernel and it got frozen when downloading openoffice; then I reset the machine again, ran the same commands, and when it had fetched all the packages, got frozen on the "working" message that appears right when apt-get is going start installing the packages. Now it won't boot, no matter what I do (had reset it like 3 times and it always gets stuck at "loading hardware drivers").

So, what could be wrong here, and how to solve it? (I had never dealt with laptops so I'm desperately crashing my head against the wall :( ). The only solution I see is to put the latest Feisty's kernel for amd64 in my USB key, chroot her installation from a live-cd (if I manage to make it work) and install it; do you think this could solve the issue?


P.S.: Sorry to bother you guys with this, but I need urgent help since my friend returns to the US next saturday, so I'm running out of time :-s

EDIT: Oh, and one issue I noticed during the first installation was that the first time it named the ethernet device as eth0 and the wireless device as eth1 and the second time I installed it, it named the ethernet device as eth1 and the wireless one as eth0 :confused:

Hm... I have the same CPU AMD Turion 64x2 and Ubuntu 32 bit installed onto my laptop and it's working perfectly.

But let me mention that when option "High precision timer" is enabled in BIOS, Ubuntu hangs up during booting as you've described. So, check it in your BIOS setup.

Hope it helps. Good luck!

Hi artiomix, thanks for your help. Well, I managed to get it working (kinda). What I did was to add the option 'acpi=off' to the installation boot parameters and this time I managed to install Feisty 32 bits successfully. The problem is when Ubuntu boots, the sounds it makes get stuck, repeating, causing a terrible noise. So I edited grub's menu.lst and changed acpi=off for 'noapic' rebooted, et voilà: the sound was working perfectly. Then I upgraded her system and after the upgrade the new kernel had the option acpi=off at the menu.lst file (and the sound issue, of course, came back), so I changed acpi=off for noapic, restarted and the sound is working fine again. Now, my question is, how to make it that when a new kernel upgrade arrives, it automatically has the option 'noapic' instead of 'acpi=off'? (my friend has no knowledge about linux, and she'll be in another country, so I won't be able to fix her menu.lst everytime a new kernel upgrade arrives).

P.S. I also realized that when booting (either a live-cd , installation cd or the installed system), I see the following error message: PCI: BIOS BUG #81 [00000000] found (the [00000000] number can change to whatever number). After googling for this bug I found I had to upgrade the laptop's BIOS with the latest firmware, so I went to HP's website, downloaded the firmware, but it still give me this error).

I'm gonna try disabling the "High precision timer" option in the BIOS, and test it to see how it works.

Thanks again.

EDIT: Solved (kind of): I reinstalled Feisty with the 'noapic' boot option and now it's working *almost* perfect including kernel upgrades, and such (the only thing I've noticed is that when I'm booting, I get the "BIOS BUG #81" message and sometimes I get weird messages at the console).