I have had terrible trouble with 7.4.2 and 8.1.0 on a Dell XPS9360. Whether booting from the KNOPPIX DVD (burn iso) or from a boot USB (I use Pendrive's Universal-USB-Installer v. 1.9.8.0, there may be other or later versions) all I got was a blank screen. But a certain amount of whirring suggested to me that the live version was in fact progressing and available. After a lot of messing about with vga=xxx in the KERNEL stanza in /boot/isolinux/isolinux.cfg I iterated to the best, sparsest and most portable version of this configuration file that I have EVER had. It reads
DEFAULT console
TIMEOUT 40
PROMPT 1
LABEL console
KERNEL linux
APPEND initrd=minirt.gz vga=893 lang=uk 1
LABEL video
KERNEL linux
APPEND initrd=minirt.gz vga=893 lang=uk #
By portable I mean this works on an ancient (really ancient) Samsung, any number of Dells in all configurations / ages, likewise Fujitsus. All screens from 800x600 to 1920x1080.
Still can't get 8.1.0 to work using a boot USB (DVD is fine). The architecture dictated by Pendrive leads to a configuration location error ("Can't find ..") from the very start. Even mimicking the geography of the 7.4.2 boot USB does not mend this.
Fergus
ORICO 5 Bay Raid Enclosure USB3.0 SATA External Hard Drive Enclosure Up to 80TB
$115.59
ORICO 5 Bay Raid USB3.0 to SATA External Hard Drive Enclosure for 3.5'' HDD LOT
$134.39
ACASIS 2.5/3.5 inch 2 Bay SATA USB 3.0 Hard Drive Disk HDD SSD Enclosure 4 RAID
$54.27
Dell H2R6M PowerEdge PERC H700 6Gb/s 512MB SAS RAID Controller
$19.99
Inspur LSI 9300-8i Raid Card 12Gbps HBA HDD Controller High Profile
$15.98
WD MyBook Duo Raid Enclosure, no Drives
$50.00
Inspur LSI YZCA-00424-101 Raid Card 12Gbps HBA Controller Low Profile 9300-8i IT
$15.98
Yottamaster 2 Bay RAID Hard Drive Enclosure USB 3.1 For 2.5" SATA HDD SSD UASP
$56.25
Vantec Dual M.2 SSD RAID PCIe X4 Host Card
$45.00
Adaptec - ASR-7805 6Gbs SAS- PCI EXPRESS 3.0 X8 -1GB Cache RAID Controller Card
$27.82