Knoppix 4.0.2 LiveCD Won't Boot on Dell Dimension 3000

**Chintue** · 11-02-2005, 12:02 AM

Hi everyone,

I've been trying to checkout the new Knoppix distro. I've downloaded the ISOs for both 3.9 and 4.0; but neither of them will boot. In the middle of booting; I get a long series of messages about hdc not being ready and bytes are lost. I've verified that the MD5 sum of the downloads were correct for both images, and I used the MD5 on the CD to verify the 4.0 burn. I've already change the integrated video memory buffer to 8mb in my bios, and I've used failsafe boot paramater on both machines. The exact same CDs boot just fine in a compaq computer, so I have no idea what is going on! What aggrevates me further is that Kanotix and Slax boot just fine without my intervention. Can anyone give me any kind of help?

Thanks,
Derek

**rwcitek** · 11-02-2005, 04:18 AM

Hello and welcome to Knoppix.net.

We hope that you enjoy your use of Knoppix and hope you become an active member of the community. There's no membership fee. We just ask that you help us and others by becoming familiar with Knoppix, posting questions, and letting the rest of us know how things go. Also, I noticed that you joined recently and so was wondering if you wouldn't mind answering a few questions.

1. - How did you hear about Knoppix?
2. - How did you discover Knoppix.net?
3. - What versions of Knoppix have you tried?
4. - What type of system are you running Knoppix on?
5. - What operating system is currently installed on that system?
6. - How long have you been using computers, or how familiar are you with computers?
7. - Have you used linux before? If so, how long?
8. - What do you hope to do with Knoppix or Linux?
9. - Are you familiar with a wiki? If so, have you used a wiki before, e.g wrote some content?

Originally Posted by Chintue

In the middle of booting; I get a long series of messages about hdc not being ready and bytes are lost.

This sounds like a classic case of a bad burn. If the ISO's md5sum checks OK, then my guess would be the CD was burnt a bit too fast. Try burning at a slower speed, < 8x if possible.

Also, booting is a rather long process. Can you be a bit more specific about where "in the middle" is? Specifically, if you boot with boot: knoppix debug -b 3 Knoppix will go through a series of stages, as depicted in this series of screenshots. What is the last successful stage that Knoppix enters?

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org

**Chintue** · 11-02-2005, 05:49 AM

Hi! I hate to be a grump, but this is in no way a bad burn. What I didn't realize until about 2 hours ago was that DMA was turned OFF by default. I turned it on and did not get the hdc- ide: device not ready message. (Which would propogate itself for about 5 minutes before indicated kernel panic.) " knoppix dma " did it just fine. Is it just me, or do many problems get lumped into "bad burning"?

Thank you everyone for your help.
Derek

**Harry Kuhman** · 11-02-2005, 06:30 AM

Originally Posted by Chintue

Is it just me, or do many problems get lumped into "bad burning"?

Many problems are diagnosed as burning problems and if fact most of those turn out to be burning problems. But to be fair to you, you problem did not sound like a burning problem to me.

**rwcitek** · 11-02-2005, 06:37 AM

Originally Posted by Chintue

Hi! I hate to be a grump, but this is in no way a bad burn. What I didn't realize until about 2 hours ago was that DMA was turned OFF by default. I turned it on and did not get the hdc- ide: device not ready message. (Which would propogate itself for about 5 minutes before indicated kernel panic.) " knoppix dma " did it just fine. Is it just me, or do many problems get lumped into "bad burning"?

Yup. Pretty much. Especially when there's very little other information to go on. Not that it's the right answer in every case. But rather it's the most likely source, is simple to fix, and is the easiest to rule out. If after checking the ISO and burning slowing, then it becomes more likely that the something else might be the problem. In my experience, turning DMA on has caused a problem and the solution was to turn DMA off. This is the first time that I've heard where the results were reversed.

Admittedly, turning DMA on would have been way down on my list of things to try. What made you think of turning it on?

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org

**Chintue** · 11-02-2005, 06:56 AM

What made me think of turning it on was the fact that there were hoards of fast-scrolling lines that read something like "Drive seek complete, status unknown." Eventually I would get an error about VFS and mounting a root at a specific block. (Please keep in mind that I know nothing about linux)

I had first thought that since my ram and the CD-rom were merged by unionfs or ramdisk or something, that somehow the addressing or usage of my ram was all screwed up by the dell bios. After I was sure that I had the most recent bios, and that the burn was good, I decided that the kernel (or whatever it is) was getting an unknown status out of the device because it needed dma to get its job done. [Now, why that is, I have no idea! Kanotix does not have this problem and they look like the same thing to me.] It was a subtle hunch, but it allowed me to treat the first half of the CDROM + RAM combination. I'm not surprised that my cheap dell toaster of a computer had such a complicated problem that was caused by something so simple.

Does the fact that my drive is a phillips DVD+- RW ring any technical bells?

**Chintue** · 11-02-2005, 07:21 AM

There has been mention of the fact that enabling dma causes problems... does one of those problems happen to be the detection of but failure to use sound harware? I fear that I have much more reading to do.

**rwcitek** · 11-02-2005, 07:24 AM

Originally Posted by Chintue

There has been mention of the fact that enabling dma causes problems... does one of those problems happen to be the detection of but failure to use sound harware? I fear that I have much more reading to do.

As far as I can tell, DMA cheatcode only refers to the harddrives or CD-ROMs.

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org

**Chintue** · 11-02-2005, 05:32 PM

If I invoke alasconf / alasmixer, I can get my sound card to work. I have no idea as to the underlying cause though, as it claims to unload and then reload sound support.

While I have someone's attention, can anyone shed further light on the unionrw situation with 4.0.2?
I tried to use disk space to replace or augment my available memory, but unionrw=/mnt/sda1/holdstuff didn't help my cause.

**MindJester** · 11-11-2005, 04:47 AM

Hey, it might have been a Bad burn, the program you burnt it with may have not written the ISO correctly, or the burn speed could have possibly been high. I have no trouble running 4.0.2. on my Dimension 3000, except I have to type "Knoppix DMA" every time I boot otherwise i get a "KNOPPIX Halted" Error, X11 cannot be started. However, I have a really big problem not being able to install KNOPPIX to my HD, even after the correct partitoning, due to a "Bad Superblock" error. There is only 1024 MBs used to boot, and there is no way I know of resizing the Cylinder Boundaries. So try to burn the ISO using a different program or a slower speed. Hope this Helps.

~