Knoppix Crashing My Laptop

[Towlies]

So I just bought a distro of Knoppix Linux off of eBay mostly for my laptop. It is a 266Mhz Pentium II Proccessor with 192 MB of ram.

So basically I set it up to boot from cd and insert knoppix cd. Then it loads up and I press enter to load it. It goes through some stuff and detects stuff.

Then I see it loading that it says all data about my proccessor and then says PCMCIA card detected then all of sudden it just instantly shuts down my laptop.

Its like a dead stop a complete shutdown instantly..Then the hard drive spins down and such. What would cause this


Any Ideas

[Harry Kuhman]

So I just bought a distro of Knoppix Linux off of eBay ........
Any Ideas

Could be any number of things, including the computer needing one or more hardware "cheat codes" to help it past the hardware detection phase. But since you bought the disc, and on top of that bought it from the electronic bay of theives, my guess is that it is a poorly made disc burnt at high speed and that it's marginal and will have problems on many systems (although it might or might not boot on others). We see lots of problems from high speed burns and this sounds more like that to me than a hardware detection problem.

I can offer two choices of action: follow the documentation link near the top of this page and read the wiki section on cheat codes and try some. The nodma and dma codes would be a place I would start but it certainly could be others, or (and this is the one that I expect will end up being the fix), follow the same link and read the Downloading faq and get your own copy of the iso; then confirm it with the md5 test and burn it as instructed in the faq, includuing burning at low speed.

[Towlies]

Well the eBay listed stated that he burned the disk at 2X Speed. The media that it was burned on was Azul not sure how good or bad that is. Also he had a pretty solid feedback....So I am not sure how good this burn is.

Also this does work on my other computer a AMD Athlon XP computer so its got all the right data on it...Its not like a bad burn.


I will try that nodma cheat code and post back.

[Harry Kuhman]

Also this does work on my other computer a AMD Athlon XP computer so its got all the right data on it...Its not like a bad burn.

We have seen many high speed burns that boot ok (or boot completely but boot slower than they should) but are still bad burns and will not boot on other systems due to small differences with the drives; the problems go away when the burn is done properly. Yes, your disk may have been burnt properly, my bias against the electronic bay of theives may or may not be valid in this case but it does leave an issue of trust of the quality of the disc that complicates things. Good luck with the cheat codes though.

[Towlies]

Alright I just tryed to boot with with dma off

I used

knoppix dma=off on the boot screen........It went through and same old shutdown.

I also tryed

failsafe which actually worked but then I could not move my mouse at all


From what I can see in the text from when its booting it goes through and the last thing I can see if PCMCIA Found...Which I odd seeing how it does that no matter if I have my PCMCIA WIFI card in there or not. Then it powers down it could be caused by something right after PCMCIA card detection that I am not able to see because it powers down

[Harry Kuhman]

My first advice is give up hope that the wifi will work, focus on the rest and when you get that resolved revisit the wifi. I have a number of wifi pcmcia cards that Knoppix does not recognize at all, even though some are supported quite well by other versions of Linux. And 5.0.1 is particularly bad, the one wifi card that I have that it did support in 4.02 no longer works in 5.0.1.

It may certainly be a cheat code other than nodma, although just what codes to try are more of a guessing game than science (at least as far as I know). You may also want to try booting in the expert mode and taking good notes as you answer all of the questions. When you get to the point that you hang, go back and change the answer to your last question.

[Devilz]

Hmmm I had a similar error to this, my laptop would freeze upon loading the PCMCIA as well.
Try typing:
knoppix ide2=0x180 nopcmcia