Disk mount error?

[dudepool]

i am booting from disk on an old sony vaio pcg-n505sn with no harddrive, it gets to the point where the penguin comes up in the top right then it says waiting for usb... then it says could not mount disk to /mnt-system. starting debugging shell... immediately followed by sh: cant access tty; job control turned off and then nothing happens

[Harry Kuhman]

Please see answer #7 (http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/User:Harry_Kuhman).

[dudepool]

i dont get it..... are you saying i should change the title of my post?

[Harry Kuhman]

Apparently you did get it, thanks.

Knoppix does not need a hard disk at all, so it may not be the hard disk that is causing your problem, particularly if as you say this is no hard disk. It might help if you told us which version of Knoppix you were using, and if it is 6.x I would suggest trying a 5.x version. But most likely it was a problem in creating the disc, and the two most common problems with making a Knoppix disc are not checking the md5 checksum before burning (very important if you downloaded from a mirror rather than using BitTorrent) and bad burns, the most common source of these is burning at high speed. I very much suggest checking the md5 checksum and if it is correct then burning the ISO at low speed. That you got as far an the penguin/penguins does indicate that you are using a correct tool to burn an ISO image, a problem that some other users have.

[dudepool]

hi, thanks for the reply originally i burnt at 48x then tried at 8x(my minimum) but no luck... i downloaded it through bittorrent and i got the link on this site so i dont know what the problem is :(

[Harry Kuhman]

If you're comfortable with the 8x burn (I have no idea why some burning software refuses to burn at lower speeds on some hardware but I have seen this too) then that leaves two issues, bad media or the need to use a "cheat code" to get Knoppix to boot on that hardware. My guess would be that you need to find the right cheat code or combination of cheat codes to boot. Read over the cheat code file that should have come with the BitTorrent download. Beyond that it may just be trial and error.

[dudepool]

hmmmm, i cant seem to find a cheat code file.

[Harry Kuhman]

By the way, I not usually at all interested in if the disc will boot in a different computer, as high speed burns often will boot in some systems but not others. But if it was really a media problem and not a burn speed issue then I would expect bad media to fail in any computer, so if this disc does boot in other computers then I don't think it is likely to be a media issue. And one way to do a low speed burn with software that doesn't want to do it is to use a CDRW media, which also avoids waste if the problem doesn't change. The other is to back out of the burn on the software that is insisting on burning faster than you want and try different burning software, often Nero will insist on a higher burning speed than other software.

[dudepool]

well i just tried a different version of linux on the same computer and still the same error, cant access tty; job control turned off so i think it might be something wrong with the computer i will try the disk on a different computer

[Harry Kuhman]

hmmmm, i cant seem to find a cheat code file.
Is should have been included in about a half dozen files that come as part of the torrent downloasd. If it is not there than I would really suggest doing that md5 test even though you downloaded with BitTorrent, takes just a minute or two and may save a lot of wasted time and at the very least rules out one potential issue. If you can't find the file you c follow the documentation link near the top of this page and read the cheat code section of the wiki.

[Harry Kuhman]

I'm not clear on why it is trying to get to tty. I've run every version of Knoppix since 3.1 on several systems, most with hard drives but some without, and I've never seen that message.

[dudepool]

i tested my disk on my work computer and it works a treat! so i have no clue as to why it isnt working at all on my laptop! so ive ruled out missing files and burn error

[dudepool]

the other computer didnt say waiting for usb on it before... maybe the laptop is too old?

[Harry Kuhman]

i tested my disk on my work computer and it works a treat! so i have no clue as to why it isnt working at all on my laptop! so ive ruled out missing files and burn error

Well, you have ruled out missing files and I'll even say that if the md5 was bad it would not likely have burnt on the other system either. You haven't really ruled out the burn issue of speed, as the faster that you burn a disc that less likely it is to boot ob some marginal optical drives. I'm more inclined to think that you need the right cheat code to boot on this system, but I can't be sure it isn't a media issue yet.

If this laptop can boot from a USB flash drive you might want to try booting Linux that way. Be warned though that even some laptops that have a USB boot option in the BIOS either will not boot a flash drive or are extremely picky about how the flash drive is created. However, I think this would be worth a try, if you saw the same error on a USB flash media boot then you could completely rule out media issues. Apparently the latest version of Knoppix can install itself to a large flash drive, but I don't have any that are suitable for it and have never done it. I have used other much smaller Linux distros to create a bootable flash drive on a small 64 meg flash drive. I think Puppy Linux can do this, but if not try DSL (it's been ages since I've done this and I don't trust my memory on which I used).

[Harry Kuhman]

the other computer didnt say waiting for usb on it before... maybe the laptop is too old?
I've booted Knoppix on old Pentium 90 systems and even 486s (although low memory can make them too slow to actually use and even the boot can take several minutes). This was older Knoppix versions, but I doubt that it is an age of the laptop issue. What are the specs on the laptop, but I doubt that is really the issue and I do expect that if you find the right cheat codes(s) that you can get it to boot.

[dudepool]

i dont think my bios supports booting from usb because in the boot options there is only:

atapi cd-rom drive
hard disk
diskette drive

[dudepool]

im not sure on any other specs other than that it has 64mb of ram, it is a notebook if you wanted to search it the model is sony vaio pcg-n505x

[Harry Kuhman]

I'm not going to spend time tracking down the specs, but if it has 64 meg of RAM then I'll go ahead and pronounce it too limited. With a hard drive you could have a swap file, but it would be overly slow as it swapped memory in and out of disk, without a swap file you are certainly not going to run the GUI, and I have doubts if you can even run the command line prompt (Linux has become bloated just like Windows). As a test you could type knoppix 2 at the boot prompt and try to boot into a command prompt shell but don't get your hopes up.

[dudepool]

when i typed knoppix 2 it just said loading linux.......... then went to the normal screen

but your saying even if it did work i wouldnt be able to run linux?

[Harry Kuhman]

when i typed knoppix 2 it just said loading linux.......... then went to the normal screen

but your saying even if it did work i wouldnt be able to run linux?
I'm not sure what you mean by "the normal screen", unless you mean that error you have reported.

64 meg is too little to run the GUI. And this is due to bloat. You certainly could run Linux (the operating system) on that computer, but in shell mode (command line text mode). But that might not give you what you want, depending on what you hope to do with the OS once you have it running. Browising the web with a graphical web browser would be out, for example, although you could still download files with FTP or use other internet tools that are non-graphical. Think DOS.

[dudepool]

ok, thanks for your help but it looks like linux is no good for me.

i appreciate it though :)

[Retroactive]

Sorry to bump an old topic, but I'm having the same issue. I bought a copy of Knoppix 6.0.1 directly from the site, so I hope the burning speed/disc isn't the problem. Are there any other possible solutions? I'm running a Dell Inspiron 1520 with a crashed hard drive. Any help is appreciated.

[Clinton]

Retroactive, I've sent you a PM.

What actually happens when you try to boot with the Knoppix CD?

[allwhoseek]

me too retroactive ... did you find a solution to this problem? Came home yesterday to find my backup laptop, which is a Dell Inspirion running XP, un responsive. Tried to no avail for 5 hours last night to revive it but no luck. One of my ideas was to run a Knoppix CD i had lying around with at least the hope of retrieving my data. Knoppix acted like it wanted to load, and i saw the penguin and Adrian, then the screen went black and no more. The original reason my OS stopped working was because it says my ntldr is missing, so don't know if that would affect a live Linux disk ...

[Harry Kuhman]

... The original reason my OS stopped working was because it says my ntldr is missing, so don't know if that would affect a live Linux disk ...
ntldr is the nt loader, software on the hard disk that is used to boot Windows. Not used by Knoppix, which can boot fine even without a harddisk.

Assuming you don't have another problem, such as a memory problem, that caused the loss of the ntldr, the most common causes of booting problems such as yours are bad burns (often caused by high speed burns and less often by bad media, occasionally by a bad download (avoidable by checking the md5 checksum before burning)), failing or marginal disc drive (try cleaning the optics), or lack of driver support for the drive (for example, trying to run old versions of Knoppix from SATA drives, but unlikely in this case).

[allwhoseek]

thank you for the quick reply. have re-downloaded and will be burning again, this time at a lower speed. the disk i used was one i had downloaded to play with last year. am i correct in thinking that if i can get it to work i can used it to retrieve my data? i know my ubuntu install can see my NTFS (windows) partitions so knoppix would as well? Thanks.

[Retroactive]

I still haven't found a resolution, no.

[Anglo]

Here's a possible fix. I had the same problem with Knoppix 6.4.4 on a Compaq Presario. It appeared that the system lost track of the DVD drive and would only look in /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 . The fix for me was to add the noapic cheat code at the boot prompt, then it found /dev/sr0 and booted. So try boot: knoppix noapic