The Lonely Penguin - Trying to Boot From CD

I'm pretty used to computers (how many times do you hear people say that right before dropping a big load of DUH all over? :D), so one day I lost an HD partition and then I realized the value of having something bootable on hand to diagnose and recover files. After I got that problem fixed, I acted on a friend's recommendation to get Knoppix on hand before the next big problem happened. So...I downloaded 3.7, checked the MD5 and burned a CD from the ISO. My computer is definitely set up to boot from CD, which it did. It gave me the boot prompt; I pressed ENTER, and then...

A penguin. All by himself. He looked kind of lonely, sitting there in the upper left-hand corner of my screen, so I thought maybe if I waited a while his friends would show up. They did no such thing, and hence after ten minutes of that poor penguin sitting by himself, I reset the computer and decided to try some other things from the boot prompt. Memtest seems to not load completely (it freezes after figuring out that I have a VIA bridge), and the "expert" command gave me a bunch of bootup text ending with pty 256 Unix98 ptys configured and a blinking cursor. Numlock and Capslock do not respond, and I don't know key combos to do stuff in Linux or Knoppix, but random stuff like the three-fingered salute, ESC, CTRL-C, etc, did nothing.

My computer is an AMD Athlon 1.2 ghz on an ASUS a7v133 mobo, which uses the VIA KT133 chipset. Graphics: Visiontek Geforce TI4200. PS/2 kb and mouse. Sound: SB Live! 5.1 Gamer (That exclamation point gets on my nerves. It really makes it look like it should be the end of the sentence. As in, "Soundblaster Live! <PAUSE> 5.1 Gamer...") HD: IDE, Samsung 160GB and an IBM 16GB. Atapi DVD/CD Writer combo from LG. No modem. USB Devices: Belkin wireless network card, a power station, a USB reading lamp. This computer incidentally runs Windows 2000 rather well, as well as Win98, Various varieties of DOS, etc. Microsoft loves it, why can't the penguin get along with it? *sniff*...

I searched through the forums but that lonely penguin really does seem to be all by himself...can you help him get some friends? Thanks,

-- Joren

how fast did you burn the CD? i would recomend 4X or so. faster has proven to mena less reliable boot cd.
also some brands of CD are good in one computer and useless in another.

I certainly agree with OErjan on the burning speed. I'm glad you checked the md5 sum. If the speed of the burn isn't the issue, you may need one or more cheat codes. Unfortunately, I know of no good science to determine which codes work for you. I found I needed knoppix acpi=off noscsi after version 3.3 or 3.4 came out (I forget which). It took me about 6 months to find that (not a full time search, I just used an older version). If those don't help then knoppix nodma helps some people. Otherwise find the list of cheat codes and start playing around with them. You might also try knoppix failsafe. This will disable most hardware checking and you may not be very happy with Knoppix if it does boot, but at least it would be a start and confirm that finding the right cheat codes is what you're going to need to do. Another approach is to try knoppix expert at the boot promt and see if any combination of answers to the resulting questions gets you past the lonely penguin.

The lowest speed I could burn at was 8x - the drive acts like it supports 4x right up until it reads the new CD-R, then the lowest setting allowed is 8x - so that was the speed these were burned at. I burned another disk and it did the same thing too. I did some Googling and it turns out CD-Rs apparently have a minimum speed encoded on them; I find hard to imagine that people took time out of their lives to make it HARDER for slow systems to burn CDs :roll:. So anyway, these were burned at 8x and my system is fast enough to ensure no buffer underruns...Easy CD Creator didn't report any.

Failsafe results in the same hang as the others, so I suppose cheat codes won't do it :(

I thought I already tried expert, but maybe expert and knoppix expert are two different things. I'll see what a reboot does.

Thanks,

-- Joren

Ok, I tried knoppix expert; it just gave me the lonely penguin again. No questions, prompts, anything.

I'm pretty sure now that CD burning reliability is not the cause. I got my hands on some software to create ISO images from a CD, so I created a new ISO from the CD I burned. The MD5s of the ISO images are exactly the same, and file-compare agrees; they have the same contents. So by process of elimination it must be something between Knoppix and my hardware, or maybe just something I haven't done right.

Any ideas how to go about troubleshooting this? I love helping to fix bugs, maybe my system would be a good test case?

Thanks,

-- Joren