Error messages when booting on Acer?

[Kustard]

I'm trying to boot Knoppix on my Acer Aspire 3690. Bear in mind I have absolutely no previous experience with Knoppix, or any other Linux-based system.

I've managed to boot it once (albeit in German) through 'failsafe', but my mouse was disabled, as was my external hard-drive - given the whole point is to back files up onto that hard-drive that wasn't too helpful :P

When I try to boot it, the booting screen gets quite a way through, but then a large string of error messages comes up. It goes too quickly for me to be able to read them all, and there are far too many for me to be able to type them all up anyway.

They begin with 'Retrying with Server Xorg(vesa)', and then a large streeam. Then Retrying with Server Xorg (fbdev), a further stream of errors, and finally Error: No suitable X-Server found for your card.

Please can you help me? I have no idea what this means, or how to solve it.

Thanks a lot!

[Harry Kuhman]

Failsafe disables a lot of hardware checking, thus the lack of the mouse (and other problems if you had got that far). But that does seem to indicate that you got a good download (although the md5 test against the ISO is still the only good way to be certain of this, and really foolish not to do if one is having problems).

The German is very likely because you downloaded a version of the ISO with DE in the filename rather than one with EN in the file name. The EN versions default to English. There is a cheatcode where you can specify English, but there is one minor got-ya, it stupidly uses the = sign in the specification and the = sign is not in the same place on a German keyboard as it is on a US or British keyboard, so you have to hunt around and find it to use the code. Stupid design, but low in the list of Knoppix problems.

You'll want to look at the cheat codes documentation for your other issues also. There is a code that will let you try standard VESA video drivers, which should let you get past the video card issue. Obviously I can't suggest other codes if you didn't post the other errors, but that's a start and you should be able to work out the rest with the cheat codes information. You got the cheat codes documentation with your download if you used BitTorrent, if you foolishly did not it should also be on the mirrors as an available file, and if you follow the documentation link near the top of this page you'll also find cheat code documentation in the wiki. While there look at the downloading faq, which includes a lot of important information.

I'll also mention that you should burn the ISO at low speed for best reliability. I see nothing here to indicate that that you have high speed burn issues, but then again "a large string of error messages comes up. It goes too quickly for me to be able to read them all, and there are far too many for me to be able to type them all up anyway" is a bad sign and not enough information to diagnose a problem with.

[Kustard]

Through use of the cheatcodes I've now managed to get it to run in English, and by typing xmodule=nv I've managed to get a more readable list of error messages.

Interestingly most of them are very similar:

Buffer I/O error on device cloop0, logical block 722327 [there is also another one identical, except that the last 7 is replaced with an 8]
Cloop: Read error at pos 511218480 in file /cdrom/knoppix/knoppix, 44415 bytes lost
Cloop: zlib decompression error -3 uncompressing block 11286 131072/0/44415/0/ 511218480-511262895

It then ends with Unloading unneeded AGP modules...
Error: No suitable X-Server found for your card.

Does this help at all?

[GUI_Hopper]

Try cheat code
vga=0 or
vga=normal they helped me. BUT, I cannot find what they mean or where to find out.

[Harry Kuhman]

You can give GUI_Hopper's suggestion a shot, but I still suggest the vesa cheat code (xmodule=vesa, I just looked it up in the cheat codes doc myself, as I hope you did). The errors do give me concern that you may have an ISO that either does not pass the md5 test or as burned at too high of a speed (I strongly suggest 4x burning speed, and try a different media if you have multiple brands available). Of course, if you are going to do a new burn, and particularly if you have a bad md5 checksum, then make sure that you download the EN version the next time and you will not need the =EN cheat code. And I can assure you that a BitTorrent download is usually so much faster than a download from the mirrors that it will more than make up for any time spent installing and learning BitTorrent.

[Harry Kuhman]

.... they helped me. BUT, I cannot find what they mean or where to find out.
vga=normal disables frame buffer mode but still runs X (the Linux low level Graphics display that KDE, Gnome or other front ends interface with). I'm not sure what vga=0 does, could do the same but I don't know that. Where did you find the suggestion to try that, and didn't that give you any clue as to what it does?

[Kustard]

I'm currently giving what you suggested a try.

I might have already tried using that particular cheat code - through trial and error I'd used a number of different ones already. I'll see if it works any better this time.

Failing that I'll try torrenting it (only reason I didn't first as last was that I'm working from an old PC which lags insanely at the best of times - torrents only make it worse).

Okay, well, it's loaded up fine - but now how do I access my files? From what I understood I should be able to access them from the desktop area? The only icons there are CD-ROM, DVD (hdb), FLloppy, KNOPPIX and Trash.

Thanks a lot

[Harry Kuhman]

......Failing that I'll try torrenting it (only reason I didn't first as last was that I'm working from an old PC which lags insanely at the best of times - torrents only make it worse).
If the md5 is good and you can live with the =EN hack then there is no reason to download again, BitTorrent or not. I don't know what hardware that you have used to run BitTorrent, but on a 384 meg 300 MegHz AMDk6 Win98 system I've had the mirrors sometimes want to take 24 hours or more to download just the CD version (the DVD came out after BitTorrent was available and I never used them for the DVD version). With BitTorrent my system was able to download the DVD version in just a couple of hours, and the CD version in less than 30 minutes. (ignore any speed estimates for BitTorrent for the first five minutes or so, it picks up quickly as the torrent progresses, and, of course, be sure that your router is forwarding the BitTorrent ports properly and any software firewall is not blocking BitTorrent (either of which might explain your observed poor performance).


Okay, well, it's loaded up fine - but now how do I access my files? From what I understood I should be able to access them from the desktop area? The only icons there are CD-ROM, DVD (hdb), FLloppy, KNOPPIX and Trash.
If the partition table is good then there should be desktop icons for your Windows partition/partitions, such as hda1 for an IDE type drive or sda1 for an SATA type drive. But Windows is quite capable of destroying a partition so well that not only can't it read the partition, Linux can't read it either. I have several hard drives that Windows has destroyed so well that I can't get the files off of it.

However, sometimes it isn't the partition itself that is destroyed, it's just the partition table in the master boot record (MBR). In this case, Linux may still be able to help you. There are two commands that can examine the entire hard drive and try to rebuild the partition table for you. I suggest that you open a command shell and type man gpart and man testdisk to read the man pages on these commands. gpart is the more technical of the two, and the one that I have used. testdisk seems to be a "for dummies" test that gives a lot less control, but it also may correct a bad partition table. My suggestion is to do a lot of reading, both the man pages suggested above and some general Google searches before you try either. Good luck, I hope that these commands can get you access to your partitions, but understand that it's not Linux's fault if they can not and Windows just destroyed the data.

If you do get access to the partitions, there are a number of ways to recover files. You mentioned an external drive. That should be workable, but if the drive is partitioned as NTFS I would not try it. The way that I have recovered files many times with Knoppix is:
1. Boot knoppix on the system to be recovered and confirm that you can see the file.

2. On another computer, install an FTP server. this can be a Windows system and there are several good free (or free trial) FTP servers available.

3, Network the two computers. Reboot the Knoppix system if need be.

4. On the Knoppix system, use Konquror as an FTP client, type in FTP://192.168.0.xxx (whatever the IP address of the FTP server is) and transfer the files by FTP. One can also use Samba and networking with Microsoft networks to xfer the files, but this can be problem prone and is slower than simple FTP transfers.

[Harry Kuhman]

P.S. there is also a Linux command called disktest as well as one called testdisk. I think that the one I'm thinking of is testdisk, but you might want to check out both and see which one looks like it has a better chance to recover a partition table. As I said, I don't use this/these commands, I have used gpart, so I'm less clear about these two commands.

[Kustard]

I redownloaded it via the torrent - loaded it up, worked first time with no problems!

Thanks a lot for the help - hopefully it should be fine now!

EDIT: Okay this part is probably painfully obvious - but when trying to copy files I am told 'you can not drop any items in a directory in which you do not have permission'. Is there any way of fixing this?

[Harry Kuhman]

I redownloaded it via the torrent - loaded it up, worked first time with no problems!

Thanks a lot for the help - hopefully it should be fine now!

EDIT: Okay this part is probably painfully obvious - but when trying to copy files I am told 'you can not drop any items in a directory in which you do not have permission'. Is there any way of fixing this?
You talk of redownloading by a BitTorrent client and that things now work. Yet you never respond at all to my suggestions that you check the ISO that you originally downloaded with a simple md5 test. I suspect that you have never done a md5 test, and so you are just ignoring this. If that's the case and you're just going to ignore stuff that you have not done before or that you don't understand, then I suggest that Linux is not for you and you should just go back to Windows. If you are willing to learn something new then I think it would be important to know if the original ISO was good or not. The fact that it booted once, although in German and in failsafe mode, implies that it was good, but some of the errors that you had raises doubt. The downloading faq explains in pretty good detail about the md5 chechsum and gives you references to several different programs that will calculate the md5 sum, so I'm hard pressed to understand what the problem was here. And if you did check the original ISO (as well as the last one you downloaded) with an MD5 test, what did you learn? Don't leave us to draw implications from the clues that you did say.

I have been able to transfer files just fine to an external USB flash drive. I don't know what you are trying to transfer files to, but I previously suggested that if it is NTFS partitioned then you will have problems with it. Worst case is that you might even destroy the partition and anything already on it by trying to write to it. I suggested an alternative. I'm really starting to feel that this is another case of "I've never done that before so I'll just ignore the advice". I sure hope I'm wrong about that.

[Kustard]

Right, maybe I should have been more clear about my motives for redownloading it. I checked it up, and discovered that, as well as having downloaded the German version, I had also downloaded an out of date version. I redownloaded the newest one using bittorrent - and when I tried to boot it up on my laptop it worked perfectly - none of the error messages I had previously mentioned came up.

Now maybe I'm wrong for thinking like this, but, seeing as I now have the newest version, which works fine, I don't really see the point in seeing what was wrong with the older version. Either way, the sarcasm was a little unnecessary.

Right, I'm working this out now finally. My problem with your FTP suggestion is that I have no idea how I would go about networking the computers. Despite what you seem to think, I have no problem learning new things - I just want to get the important files off my laptop as quickly and painlessly as possible. My problem is that I have a large amount of stuff on there which I'd much rather not lose - I'm able to access them, but not copy them as my external harddrive is, as you said, NTFS. This is not a topic I know much about - I only discovered that it was NTSC through trying to mount it without the read-only option.

If you can recommend a tutorial or similar on how to network the computers then that would be much appreciated. I assume there's no (plausible) method of using NTFS volumes with Knoppix?

[Harry Kuhman]

Some people seem to think that the newest version of Knoppix can safely write to NTFS partitions. From what I have observed in these forums, I do not. I'm not going to lead anyone down what seems to me a path to disaster. If you really want to use that external USB drive, you should be able to reformat it as FAT32. There would be one small restriction in doing that; it couldn't hold any files that were 4 gig or larger in size (including the Knoppix DVD ISO itself) but in theory you should be able to back up all of your normal size files just fine.

As to networking systems, it does depend on what hardware you have. You are apparently connected to the Internet, and that you downoaded a new version of the Knoppix ISO (perhaps even the newest DVD version) you likely have a high speed connection. If you are using a router then you likely have everything that you need to network you computers. If you are not using a router than I'm guessing that I know how your Windows system got infected and destroyed. You seem to hold back a lot of information, rather than my writing a long post that covers all likely configurations that you might have, it would be helpful if you told us about your system. If your hardware doesn't include a router or at least a NAT firewall in a DSL or cable modem (your computers address will not be a public IP address, most likely one that begins with 192.168.xxx.xxx if it does), then I strongly suggest getting a router before you run Windows again, and do several different virus scans and root kit tests on any other computer that you have used on the Internet connection.

As to the sarcasm, it gets very frustrating when one keeps suggesting something as simple as the md5 test and the other party just keeps ignoring the suggestion. I guess I could just go with my first impulse, quite wasting my precious time on someone who is ignoring things and not posting much good information, but in this case I didn't do that. I assure you that I have learned from this exchange, from now on when I suggest to someone that they make a simple md5 test and point them to the faq that explains the md5 test, I will not respond to them again if they exhibit the all too common behavior of ignoring the md5 test because they have never done one before.