Simply will not boot

[kpf8655]

Knoppix 3.2, 3.4, and Feather all hang on boot at the point right after loading vmlinuz...... The screen clears and Tux appears, then nothing but a blinking cursor. CTL-ALT-DEL will not work at that point. The CD can be ejected. I've tried nodma, nopcmcia, noacip, acpi=off, etc... I've even tried expert and interactive. It always hangs at the same point.

The machine is a Slot-1 PIII-450, 384 Mb ram (8Mb shared video). The mobo is a PCChips 478LMRT. The onboard LAN is disabled in BIOS and a PCI LAN card is installed instead.

I'm at a loss - any ideas?

[OErjan]

try the cheatcodes to give you a 800x600 screen, it MAY be that the 1024x768 is too much for your screen/card combo,

[kpf8655]

I'll give it a try.

But, I don't think that would be it because it never reaches a point where screen resolution matters - it never even makes it to the hardware detection part.

On a couple of tries, it did get beyond the tux image and displayed the line "Welcome to the live linux-on-cd" (or something like that) line right below tux. But nevery any further.

[jolly]

Burn another CD ? I had a ruined system evertime I installed RedHat a couple of years ago. I was almost ready to throw in the towel. I then burned 3 more cds and the next install worked just fine.

I was suprised that the cd would work in the drive without the operating process (anaconda installer, in my case) complaining of a media error, but there it was.

Everytime I get funky results from a burnt image, I cook another just to be sure.

[pulsar]

Have you checked the cd image? 'knoppix testcd'

[kpf8655]

It's not the Knoppix CD. I can boot my regular desktop into knoppix off this cd just fine - I've been using it for quite some time now. There's just something on this particular machine that Knoppix doesn't like.

[jman217]

I have the same problem on a dual PIII 733, a single 733 and a P4 2.4Ghz, when booting with the 2.4 kernel i just get a black screen and that is it. THe machine is locked up and you have to use the power button to reset it. The P4 and dually will work with the 2.6 kernel, but I really need to use 2.4. I have tried new cd's and a bunch of cheat codes. Any suggestions?

[kpf8655]

Looks like for me, it was a true hardware problem. There was some kind of a memory problem. It turned out that I could not even install windows without running into weird problems. I forget what indicated it, but I finally removed one of the memory sticks and things started working - sort of. Still couldn''t get the penguin to load, but I did manage to get windows going. Nevertheless, there were so many problems that I finally gave up and put the box in the recycle bin. It was only going to be a distro test box anyway.

[ghostblaze]

I bet you 10$ it was the nic

[shah]

jman217
Perhaps you need a kernel 2.4.xx with smp support.


kpf8655
It's the mobo. Pcchips is terrible. I had 2 of this mobo and both won't work with linux and often crashes windows. This mobo seem can't resolve memory problem/allocation.