Laptop: Acer TravelMate 2480

I've installed RHEL4 twice and CentOS 4.4 once on this new machine and both show the exact same error when booting up from a fresh installation:
[/http://img184.imageshack.us/img184/2553/mycam422tb8.jpg
And then it just stays on that screen forever and wont continue.

Is this a hardware problem? Should I send it back for warranty? on what basis can I say for a fix?

I even tried to install windows and it just goes blank after the "detecting your hardware specs..." screen. Oh and the laptop came with no oem software like windows to start with.


Thank You.

i dont know the answer, but change your image link to: http://img184.imageshack.us/img184/2553/mycam422tb8.jpg. the one you have now is the thumbnail and unreadable.

edit: in the BIOS try and disable all PCI devices/ports. if that works, then try and enable them one at a time. ie network card

thanks. I'll try that out.

@nadroj
I wasn't able to find any PCI devices/ports to disable at the BIOS.

OK, so I finally got it working... somehow. Well basically these are what I found out:

- RHEL4 server edition and CENTos4 shows the error shown above BUT RHEL Desktop was able to startup after the boot menu.
- RHEL5 shows some sort of the same error but starts up properly.
- About WinXP going blackout after detecting hardware devices screen; I found a discussion on the web that xp has some sort of problem going to the partition manager when a current grub or linux installation is existing, so I used another utility to format the whole HD first and then install winOS, and then linux afterwards.