Hi aay and rickenbacherus.

Regards the CD being damaged, I don't think that it is the situation. I just used it on my desktop machine and it worked fine. What I think is happening is that after the "Autoconfiguring Devices...." everything get's switched off, so there is no access to the CDROM any more. After that in fact, the CD doesn't spin again not even when these errors start to come up.

Regards going to console mode, I have tried different combinations, including the one suggested by rickenbacherus, 2, failsafe and expert, but in all of them, the sytem simply stops at some point or another. I never get to console mode to call dmesg | less. That is why I was asking if it is possible to make the kernel log for example to floppy, so that when it stops, it will still be able to see where it stopped.

It's useless trying to understand what hardware I have if I can't find out why and where it is stopping.