Live CD dies at VFS Mounted Root

[simusid]

I am having a problem with a brand new homebuilt system. It is an AMD64 3200 running on an MSI RX480 Neo2 motherboard ( I think that might be a k8n but I'm not positive). I have a generic 80gb ide drive as primary master, a CD on slave, plus two more SATA drives.

In general I have had no luck getting any version of linux to boot. I tried FC4 first, then FC6 because I thought it needed more recent support. I've also tried FreeNAS, a FreeBSD liveCD. They all fail in various ways. I moved to Knoppix because I've had the best luck using it as a troubleshooting tool in the past.

In short, I'm using knoppix LiveCD 5.0.1 and even trying a 'failsafe' install it dies during the initial boot with no real error. Everything looks normal up to the message " VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)" and then it just hangs.

The only other relevant message I get is using FreeNAS, it panics with the message "ACPI: Unable to load the system description tables"

I have tried the BIOS failsafe defaults, removed and disabled SATA, and I've tried every boot parameter like no{acpi|dma|scsi} etc. I think the BIOS is current and I don't think I have any way to reload it anyway, as XP doesn't load either.

I've exhausted everything I think I can do and I'm about to just throw it away and buy a new 939 mobo. Does anyone have any tips about troubleshooting stubborn hardware like this?

[ockham23]

No need to throw it away. Kanotix has a good reputation of supporting even problematic hardware and it also has the latest kernel 2.6.18. Here is my advice:
1. Download Kanotix-2006-01-RC4.iso from http://kanotix.com
2. Burn it to cd and copy the iso file to the root directory of any partition on hda. The filesystem can be NTFS or Linux ext2/ext3/reiserfs, but not FAT32.
3. Boot the computer off the cd and append cheatcode fromiso=K*.iso to the line of boot commands at the grub boot screen. As a result, only grub and the kernel image file will be read from the cd, everything else will be extracted from the iso file on the hard drive.

If there's a secondary IDE channel connector on the mainboard, connect the cd-rom drive to it, set it to "master" and try booting again.

[simusid]

No need to throw it away. Kanotix has a good reputation of supporting even problematic hardware and it also has the latest kernel 2.6.18. Here is my advice:
1. Download Kanotix-2006-01-RC4.iso from http://kanotix.com
2. Burn it to cd and copy the iso file to the root directory of any partition on hda. The filesystem can be NTFS or Linux ext2/ext3/reiserfs, but not FAT32.
3. Boot the computer off the cd and append cheatcode fromiso=K*.iso to the line of boot commands at the grub boot screen. As a result, only grub and the kernel image file will be read from the cd, everything else will be extracted from the iso file on the hard drive.

If there's a secondary IDE channel connector on the mainboard, connect the cd-rom drive to it, set it to "master" and try booting again.

It's great to learn about a new tool like Kanotix, so I can have that available to help me troubleshoot. However, my ultimate goal for this particular problem is to figure out how to get a mainstream linux OS on this box (an eventual file server). So I'm more interested in diagnosing what is wrong so I can isolate or correct it.

Thanks again for the tip.

[ockham23]

If there's a secondary IDE channel connector on the mainboard, connect the cd-rom drive to it, set it to "master" and try booting again.

[simusid]

If there's a secondary IDE channel connector on the mainboard, connect the cd-rom drive to it, set it to "master" and try booting again.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried the second IDE channel with the cdrom as master and the result is the same.