Hi all,

Ive just got my hands on an old Dell latitude Cpt laptop with a 500mhz celeron cpu, i currently runs XP Pro but thought i'd try Linux.

I got a copy of knoppix started the boot, it loads up the boot menu and i can select to run knoppix the screen clears and i get two messages setting DMA for Hdd and CD but this is where my problems start.....

the next line say's looking for knoppix... and thats as far as it gets.

I have also tried Mepis with the same problem. any Ideas please......


cheers

Hi. When it asks you what you want to boot,instead of saying 'knoppix' try 'failsafe'(it may be two words). When I've had that problem in the past with laptops,that's usually fixed it.

Welcome to LQ. Are you certain that your Knoppix CD is valid? If you downloaded the ISO image yourself and burned it, did you check the MD5SUM checksum first? That's the way to validate that the image wasn't corrupted during download, and you should be able to get a copy of it from the same place you downloaded Knoppix. It will be a long string of random-looking letters and numbers, but it should match the output from running the command
where "<imagefile>" is your ISO download, eg, KNOPPIX_V5.0.1CD-2006-06-01-EN.iso

As long as the output from the md5sum command matches the MD5SUM text value, all is well. FYI, for the ISO I used as an example the output should be Burn the ISO to the CD as an image file, not as a regular file (dragging and dropping won't work) and burn at a slow speed to reduce the chance of getting a coaster. If you've done all that already, then there is probably some other issue causing the problem

thanks for the response guys....

here's an update with simplyMepis i booted using the option ide=nodma and it carried on to the loggin screen but then hangs with the CD running constant, still no joy with Knoppix as they same option doesnt seem to work.

So i have just finished downloading Mandriva to give that a shot but have just realised i got no blank cd's left lol

Well,hopefully mandriva works for you. So you tried the failsafe option with knoppix? I've had problems with livecds hanging on laptops,too,but the failsafe or acpi=off(I'm not sure if knoppix uses that syntax)options work for me.

Well thanks guys problem solved, ive ditched the live cd idea, it seems as though the problem with ubuntu, knoppix and simplyMepis is related to DMA, excluding knoppix there is an option to turn it off but i was still getting system lockups.

Anyway Ive just finished installing Centos 4 as a dual boot with XP Pro and this was faultless if just a little slow on an old machine. I am really detemined to get my head around Linux so onwards and upwards... 24 hours down and lots to go. For my next problems see my later post... USB Wireless Adapters...

Many thanks for your help...