I have a laptop on which I cannot run any slackware based live cd I've yet tried. The most recent one I have tried is Wolvix. I press enter at the boot prompt and the status bar on the next screen moves almost to the end before the screen goes blank and I am unable to eject the disk witjout restarting the system I cannot enter verbose mode during this time by pressing the f2 key. No errors messages are displayed.
The laptop is a Rock xtreme with centrino duo T7200 processor, 2gb of ram and currently has vista and ubuntu 7.10 dual booted on it.
Vector and goblinx will also not run on this. I know the wolvix disk is not the problem as it runs fine 'live' on my desktop and I have done a hd install from it onto an old compaq laptop.

Any suggestions for confused newbie?

The most common reasons for live CDs failing to boot are:
ACPI IRQ issues, missing storage module (SATA), or video driver compatibility.

The live CDs I've used have options to get around these things - typically entering something like noacpi or acpi=off at boot. Since I don't know the distro you're using, I can only suggest you consult the docs for the exact syntax and try some of these things.

Many thanks for that. Distro I am trying is wolvix hunter1.1.0, and what you suggested got the system to boot however I cannot start x and get the message: Fatal server error: Caught signal 8. Server aborting

I have a Geforce go 7950 gtx card on the laptop so I guess the drivers for this would be the problem? I'd like to eventually get it installed on the hd of the laptop but problems like this make me with my limited linux experiance somewhat wary!

Hi,

Most LiveCD distros have boot options. On the boot screen you might be presented with information for a help screen, generally F2 & F3. You should see if a Vesa framebuffer option is available.

Or even a laptop boot option.

Glad you're making progress.

Just to expand on what onebuck said - look for the VESA Framebuffer video driver option. That will be a generic driver and at least get you to a screen. However, just like your first boot in Windows without the right graphics driver, you won't have full resolution and features. You'll need to add the nVIDIA driver for that.

Some live CDs have a provision for saving the config. See if yours does. That way, you can keep from having to go back to square one on every boot.

Thanks for the help. I'll try your suggestions when I get chance and let you know how I fare.