knoppix 3.7 nearly fries cousin's PC :(

I made a copy of knoppix 3.7 for my cousin, who has a brand new Dell mini tower, which he purchased about a year ago.

Unfortunately, on bootup, knoppix froze on detecting USB, and then he tried to reboot the machine but the monitor would no longer work, that is it wasn't picking up a video signal from the video card on bootup. He couldn't boot into Windows XP, and he couldn't use knoppix 3.7.

I finally figured out that I would disconnect the power cord to the PC and then try to power up the computer to discharge the capacitors in the power supply. After powering up for about a second and a half it shutdown, with capacitors discharged.


I then replugged the power cord to the computer, with the power switch turned off. Then I rebooted the machine. This finally fixed what happened to his machine and he was able to boot into windows again.

This really scared me from giving out copies of knoppix to people. For a minute there, we thought that booting knoppix nearly fried his computer. I could see what was happening to my cousin. He is a student studying electronics engineering, and this PC is really necessary and important to him for his education.

I don't want that to happen to anybody else.

THe weird thing is that I have an older Dell Optiplex from about 1997-98 and it boots knoppix just great, and it even detects all my hardware. It is the only LiveCD I have tried that can detect all of my hardware correctly the first time.

I gave out lots of copies of the OpenCD, which is an open source CD, but for windows and has lots of articles about Linux on it. It is a really nice CD for people not familiar with open source software. That CD presents no problems, as it does not interact with hardware directly. GNUWinII is another nice set of CDs for windows, just like the OpenCD.

I really like LiveCDs because they introduce people to what Linux is, but because LiveCDs need to access hardware directly, it can cause problems sometimes with hardware.

As the warning on the knoppix website says, " this is BETA software, we cannot be held responsible for what happens to your hardware by using this CD".

I didn't take that warning seriously until this happened to my cousin's PC.

The funny thing is that I was able to install Redhat 9 several months ago on his machine. I even found a WinModem driver for his 56k winmodem, and it all worked perfectly. I decided to use a boot floppy instead of writing to GRUB on the MBR because I was affraid he wouldn't be able to boot into his windows machine. It is unfortunate that this isn't possible with Fedora anymore, at least I don't think.

So, until I can figure out what's going on with the interaction of the knoppix CD on my cousin's machine, I am affraid to install another linux distro on his machine, for if something happens to his PC, I can't afford to buy him another, and he really needs that PC.

Maybe somebody can help me out here.

P.S.: I don't want to scare anybody from trying out linux and a LiveCD, for that matter, as this the first taste of linux that many have.

So if you want to try a LiveCD, don't let me scare you. This is just a problem that I had and wanted to share this with someone that might be able to help me out on how to get passed this problem.

Let me just add that the Knoppix CD that I gave was in spanish, so this was a version of knoppix 3.7 with the only difference being the language, everything else of this spanish version was stated to be/is identical, and so the software and the setup of the CD has been unmodified, therefore the problems encountered on the spanish version might be identical to the english version.

Some monitors are simply not Linux compatible.
My girlfriend has a weird Chinese-made monitor and it doesn't work under Knoppix. Knoppix tries to get a good screen refresh rate, and it just fails.
X windows doesn't appear, and Knoppix is just unusable with it except in text mode.

I'm guessing that you had a non-standard monitor, and if it was CRT and unsupported, Knoppix may have given the monitor a thrashing as it went out of sync to find a suitable Xwindows setting. In some cases, throwing CRT monitors into weird frequencies can actually break them. This doesn't happen with true TFT monitors though. Try booting up again and when it seems to have stopped, try pressing Ctrl+Alt+f2 to try and drop into text mode.
If you are getting text mode and a command prompt, then it's probably safe to assume that your monitor is unsupported.

Note: this happened before knoppix started accessing the video resolution modes for X.

The problem I had on bootup happened exactly during the USB scanning mode.

So, this happened well at the begining of bootup. It didn't make it all the way to logging in to X or scanning for video modes.