Quote Originally Posted by segway
My cd runs on another machine...not only my laptop, but a buddy's desktop.
That's a very strong indication that it's a good download. All of the times I've seen corruption on a download it had been bad enough to cause the CD not to boot properly and fully on any system. Not 100% proof, but I'm convinced. Of course, it's not me who has the problem...

Quote Originally Posted by segway
Haven't checked the checksum, but can download and burn at 2x not 4x...NBD.
Burning at 2x is even better than 4x. Some new DVD/CD burners are insisting on burning some CDR media no slower than 8x (although they will still burn CDRW at 4x). The best advice we can give is 4x or as slow as your drive will allow but 2x is great.

Not sure what NBD is. Maybe some form of Nero Burning Something, but that just a guess. If it is Nero it's better to spell out Nero 5, Nero 6, Nero Express, Nero for Dummies, or whatever, but maye it's not Nero at all. Whatever it is, that you CD boots on the friend's system confirms that the burning procedure was good, and the speed of the burn leaves me to think that is not the reason it's not booting for you.

Quote Originally Posted by segway
Laptop keyboard IS live.
Laptop mouse-pad is live, as is "the pointer from hell".

A v3.8 live cd yields the SAME message on my desktop machine.

SLAX loads on my machine!
Yup, all of this was clear. Makes it most likely that your problem will turn out needing to find the right codes that you can enter on the system where you have a working keyboard. If you need cheat codes on the other system you'll have to find a way to type them at the boot prompt.

Quote Originally Posted by segway
The error code appears to be a hex number...memory address perhaps?
Time to ask the penguin.
If you can decode it, great. It's amazing sometimes what Google will tell you with just a number to search on.

Quote Originally Posted by segway
The checksum will be a waste of time...it runs on other machines.
But just for the hell of it, I'll do another d/l and slow burn, then
check it.
I think it will be a waste of time too. But if you still have the ISO don't download it again, just get the md5 file and run the check with a md5 program like md5summer. And if you do download it again, don't burn and then check, the proper steps are download, check the iso against the md5 file to confirm a good download, then burn slowly as an image.