3.4 CD won't boot on two machines

[cottlestonpie]

i've had no trouble with previous knoppix, so i'm wondering if someone can point me to a FAQ or bug page that might shine some light. the CD does work in other machines.

on Box1 knoppix fails at the second screen. you get the very first screen where you can hit return to enter. hit enter, and things start. next should be the second screen with the pretty colours and small text, except i get a blank screen instead. on all three monitors. this will continue as long as you care to gaze at it.

Box1 is Duron GA-7ZXE with Nvidia GeForce 2 MX/MX 400 agp dual monitor card, and some plain old pci ATI Rage for the third monitor. knoppix 3.1 boots this with no problem.

on Box2 i get to the second screen, just not very far into it. knoppix scans for usb, and enables ide devices (all of 5 lines) then we get a nice red,

"
Can't find KNOPPIX filesystem, sorry.
Dropping you to a (very limited) shell.
Press reset button to quit.
"

then knoppix lists six of the commands available and gives me prompt.

Box2 is Asus P3B-F with agp Nvidia Vanta/Vanta LT.

i'm using both boxes with a KVM. shouldn't matter, and works fine with knoppix 3.1, but i'm reaching for straws here.

only other thing i can think to say is 3.4 did run on Box2 before i rebuilt it with different drives. i reset bios to default, and have only adjusted that to ensure its first CDROM is part of the boot sequence. the boxes run their respective windows with no trouble.

i'm quite baffled.

suggestion, anyone? thanks.

[fingers99]

You need a cheatcode. (See above, under Docs).

At a guess, Knoppix nodma

[softwaretester]

You need a cheatcode. (See above, under Docs).

At a guess, Knoppix nodma

Also, 'knoppix testdisk' usually checks to make sure that the disk has the right checksum.

[cottlestonpie]

well, cheatcodes return a message that knoppix can't find the kernel.

so i lent the disk to a friend to test on one of his boxes to see if the CD itself has failed. he just emailed me under knoppix that it runs fine as 2.4, and "segmentation fault" on trying 2.6 kernel. i only tried the default 2.4.

how very odd.

when the disk comes back i'm going to disconnect the KVM and try it. i can't imagine how that would be the problem but we've got something weird here so i might as well test unlikely items. after that i'm stuck. the rest of my hardware is quite plain vanilla.

[mbourgon]

Dell Dimension l500c. Only odd thing about it is that the Hard Drive has a failed Lindows install on it, and I haven't wiped it yet. It is also hooked up to a KVM, a "Miniview"

Computer is a Celeron 500 (had 128, now 384 RAM). 3.3 works fine, this disk works fine in another machine. But on this machine I get:

Scanning for USB/Firewire devices...done
Enabling DMA acceleration for: hda [IBM-DJNA-371350]
Enabling DMA acceleration for: hdc [samsung sc-140b]
Can't find KNOPPIX filesystem, sorry.
Dropping you to a (very limited) shell.
Press reset button to quit.

I'm stumped.

[cottlestonpie]

i've got the disk back and get exactly the same results without the kvm.

i'm stumped too. prev knoppix had not only ran on everything i'd tried, but had the best hardware detection of the five disk distros i've used. this new issue is bad news for anyone trying to demo linux with knoppix. i wonder what it could possibly be choking on that early in the process?

[cottlestonpie]

while i think of it: i mentioned that 3.4 ran on a previous incarnation of Box2 with different drives. previous setup was all CS with the jumpers, current is MA/SL for all four ide. i've no idea how Box1 is set up. was a while ago.

i can't see how that'd matter, but i also can't see why thing aren't working.

[mbourgon]

(since it doesn't appear in the post) NODMA worked - thanks for the help. I didn't see it in the FAQs I looked at.

[cottlestonpie]

thanks mbourgon.

for the record, here nodma results in a blank screen and no activity on box 1.

nodam starts box 2 though. (listening to it play my tunes right now. hurray for successful soundcard detect.)

both boxes run knoppix 3.1 fine, and box 2 ran 3.4 without cheatcodes before i changed ide devices and set bios to defaults.

anyone have news of why 3.4 is being cantankerous?