Hello there. I'm having trouble getting my computer to boot from two different linux live cds, and I'm looking for ideas. Last night, I downloaded both Damn Small and Puppy linux to my emac and burned disk images of both. When I tried to boot my Dell Inspiron 8100 with them, they both appeared to work at first, but then both stopped booting part way through the process. I've run this computer on an earlier live cd version of Puppy without any problems before, and the fact that neither disk works leads me to believe I did something wrong when burning them.

I downloaded the iso files for both Puppy and Damn Small and burned these as images each to their own disk. This all I remember doing before, and I like I said, it worked in the past. I'll post more details later in the day--like where the boot process actually stops and what versions of each system I downloaded, but if this rings any bells for anyone, I'd love somee help.

Thanks.

Can you try booting from older version?

Welcome to LQ
Where do they stop ?

You could try to burn the cd's at a lower speed

You should verify the iso after you downloaded it (md5sum or sha256sum), you can take some extra precautions and verify data is written to the CD and on the Dell do a medium test.

Thanks everyone for the tips so far. I just tried burning a copy of puppy again at a lower speed, but had the same problem. After the kernel module loads, I get the following line:

do_IRQ: 0.176 No Irq handler for vector (irq -1)

After this text appears, the boot process stops. Does this shed any more light on what's happening? I have no idea what this message means.

Thanks.