Knoppix 4.0 won't start to boot....

I have a bought Knoppix 4.0 DVD that won't boot. Thr computer is a stock 1.0 g NetVista IBM, and the Bios is set for 'CD' first and hard drive last. Nonetheless, it skips over the 4.0 DVD and starts on the system on the hard drive (KnoppMyth) The computer has a CD player as #1, and a DVD burner as #2. A 'live CD system (Mepis) will boot from either one, obviously, the DVD has to be in the DVD burner, but every config I've tried for the drives, skips to boot the HD. I can read the DVD, running from another system, but I can't figure how to make it boot.

You may have to take alook at Smart Boot Manager which a program loaded on to a floppy disk. The system boots from the floppy and then you can choose to boot any of the avaiable devices in a system.

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Originally Posted by UnderScore

Smart Boot Manager which a program loaded on to a floppy disk.

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I agree, if there is nothing wrong with the DVD then you may resolve the issue with SBM. But it doesn't have to be loaded on a floppy, I have it loader on the MBR and use it to boot an OS from the hard disk or from an optical disk. When you do this with an installed Linux you install SBM to the MBR and the Linux bot loader (normally lilo or grub) to the Linux partition.

Another even nicer tool is XOSL. It used SBM code to do the optical disk boots, but has a much nicer looking user interface and is a lot more powerful, worth the few minutes it takes to set it up.

I ran into this problem before to... make sure your dvd drive is +r and -r. The media might not be compatible with your drive or the file might have been corrupt when burnt.

Open the case, set the jumpers of both drives to "cable select (csel)" and put the DVD burner at the end of the IDE cable. As a result, the DVD burner should become the "master" drive for IDE channel #2.

Make also sure that you use an 80 pin IDE cable to connect your disk drives.

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Originally Posted by ockham23

Open the case, set the jumpers of both drives to "cable select (csel)" and put the DVD burner at the end of the IDE cable. As a result, the DVD burner should become the "master" drive for IDE channel #2.

Make also sure that you use an 80 pin IDE cable to connect your disk drives.

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I do not agree with ockham23's suggestion to use a CS configuration, but if you do then you absolutely do have to use an IDE2 cable, 80 wires and a blue connector on one end, or it will not work. I see no advantage at all to do this over just checking the drive jumpering and being sure that the drive you want to be seen first is jumpered as master and the other is slave, particularly if you are going to be looking at the jumper settings anyway.

Thanks for the suggestions gentlemen.

My DVD drive is a 'does it all' including + and -
I collected the info on 'Smart Boot manager' and may try a floppy boot for the experience, but my problem lies in bad media on the store-bought DVD.

I played with every which configuration of slave & master & which one is on the end of the cable, it didn't make any difference (probably in light of my later finding about the media) BTW both drives were happy with cable select (apart from not booting the bad DVD) although I didn't know about the IDE2 cable, (used what's in the machine, a 2001 IBM) I even made the DVD drive master by itself on the cable.

Testing the DVD in two other IBMs resulted in one passing on booting the DVD, and the other (brand new, fast, & a gig of ram) booting to the 'info screen'
Every click resulted in long read seissions for the DVD drive. Dmsg returned a screenfull of 'media error- bad sector' messages.

Thanks for the help & the education, I've got to go gripe at a vendor... :?

@Harry: I don't understand. What's wrong about cable select?

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Originally Posted by ockham23

@Harry: I don't understand. What's wrong about cable select?

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My biggest concern is that while hard drives usually come with a new style 80 wire IDE2 cable, the optical drives I see usually come with no cable and never with an IDE2 cable, and an older style IDE1 that will not work for CS is usually already in the case or comes with most motherboards.. While IDE1 cables can be specially manufacturered to do CS, it is a more expensive process (the cable has to be split into 3 parts and a twist added between the second and third connector) and although I've worked on a lot of computers I've never actually seen an IDE1 cable that would support CS. I have heard but not confirmed that IDE2 supports CS in it's standard form. If this is true and if the user really understands about using the right cable and not what came in his computer when he got it, then CS should work. But why should anyone do this? CS was mainly created for the sake of manufacturers, not end users. In theory it allows faster assembly because a manufacturer can have all drives jumpered the same and then they are properly configured by where they are on the cable. But for an end-user, who already has drives that are not jumpered to CS, the solution only introduces the potential for problems, such as the wrong wire now or even the wrong cable later when somone works on the system. Rather than remove both drives and change the CS settings on both drives, the user really needs only to look at both sets of jumpers to make sure one is master and the other slave; it is likely that at most one of the drives will have to be changed in such a case. They can also select which drive is master based on type of drive (putting the DVD before the CD) and/or by position in the case (helping make the drives letters in a Linux system make logical sense) rather than being totally dependent on how the IDE cable is routed.

So with no real up-side and potential downside, I see no reason for the home user to use CS on their drives.

Have you tried the linux-TAG version of 4.0? (I think release date is like 2005-06-25?

pterandon:

It is a Linux Tag version, according to the case.

Harry:

Thanks for the discussion on cable select, I had never seen what the reason for it was beyond, as you described, convenience for the manufacturer.
As I noted above, the two drives on my machine still worked together when in cable select mode, I don't think the original ribbon is IDE2 but is is split, [I thought to facilitate routing...] (how can I tell- if it's a smooth ribbon it's not, if its split with a twist it is ?.. )
I plan to put them back together with the DVD as master & CD as slave. Does it matter which is on the end of the ribbon ? (SCSI can be fussy about that....)

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Originally Posted by snaproll

As I noted above, the two drives on my machine still worked together when in cable select mode, I don't think the original ribbon is IDE2 but is is split, [I thought to facilitate routing...] (how can I tell- if it's a smooth ribbon it's not, if its split with a twist it is ?.. )

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I would suggest some Google searching, but to be honest I just did that and I come away with more doubts than answers. I found some discussion of a CS IDE cable not with a twist but with one wire cut. Also I found information that directly conflicted with what ockham23 gave below.

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Originally Posted by snaproll

I plan to put them back together with the DVD as master & CD as slave. Does it matter which is on the end of the ribbon ? (SCSI can be fussy about that....)

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If you jumper for master and slave, it will not matter. Pick which drive you wish to be which and run the cable for best reach to the drive and best air flow. The only concern I can mention here is that you should use as short a cable as reasonable (over 18 inches is considered risky although I have done it on one full size tower case with poorly positioned MB connectors) an if you only have one master device instead of a master and slave the master should be on the end of the cable, not on the connector closest to the computer (it's a transmission line thing to avoid the unterminated end of the wire from picking up signals like an antenna or echoing back signals that hit the end of the wire and bounce back).

Unfortunately, if you use CS at this point I'm not sure how it works. My Google search turned up references that say the master is the middle connector (closer to the MB) but ockham23 says that the master is on the end.

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Originally Posted by ockham23

Open the case, set the jumpers of both drives to "cable select (csel)" and put the DVD burner at the end of the IDE cable. As a result, the DVD burner should become the "master" drive for IDE channel #2.

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I have no idea who is right, as I just don't use CS, and none of this causes me problems. If the above reference that I found is correct then it's just another reason to not use CS, at least when you only have a master or if the slave might ever be removed, even for testing. That extra unterminated connector hanging off the end of the cable (rather than being in the center, which is ok), can be a source of randon and hard to identify problems.

For the modern 80-conductor cable it's master at the end (black connector) and slave at the gray connector. The blue connector plugs into the motherboard.

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Originally Posted by ockham23

For the modern 80-conductor cable it's master at the end (black connector) and slave at the gray connector. The blue connector plugs into the motherboard.

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Agreed. I examined the ide ribbon that came with a new Seagate drive & it was color coded, and the instruction manual was as you stated.

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Originally Posted by ockham23

For the modern 80-conductor cable it's master at the end (black connector) and slave at the gray connector. The blue connector plugs into the motherboard.

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This may well be true for many IDE cables that are now shipping, but it does bring out another point where there could be a problem. I have several IDE2 cables (80 wires) that do not meet this standard. I certainly expect there are other users out there also who have cables like mine. Yet using an 80 wire IDE cable was all you suggested (actually, worse than that, you advised using an 80 pin IDE cable) and that is not enough to make things work.

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Originally Posted by ockham23

Make also sure that you use an 80 pin IDE cable to connect your disk drives.

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Unless something has happened that I've missed, all IDE connectors still have 40 pins, but the new type use an 80 wire cable. Stll, if users interpret your advice as I did to mean "use an IDE cable with 80 wires", they could still have problems unless they happen to have what you now call a "modern" IDE cable, as opposed to just having an IDE 2 cable. Yet "modern" is a vague and therefor confusing term, I thought modern and IDE 2 refered to the same thing until we started this discussion and I would have used the IDE 2 cable that came with my motherboard 5 years ago. But while it has 80 wires, it doesn't have the color coded black and grey connectors and I expect that it would not work for this purpose. Just another thing that can go wrong when you tell others to use cable select.

If you are happy with cable select and you know you are using all the correct modern cables, then fine, go ahead and use it. But master and slave simply works and is not dependent on someone's IDE 2 cable being "modern" (or being IDE 2 at all, as many users optical drive cables still are not). I still don't see any reason to advise someone already using master and slave and having problems to try to switch to CS when it can only complicate things. Nothing at all is gained over using CS rather than M/S setting. I would have just advised the user to check their drive jumpering and be sure that the drive they want to be first is jumpered master and the other is jumpered slave. You had them check both drives also, but make a change on each one, and then they had to have the right "modern" IDE 2 cable or they would really be messed up. And unless they knew how to position the drives on the cable so that the one they wanted was the master then they might end up wondering why the wrong drive tried booting first (or in the case of some BIOSs, only the wrong drive booted).