Booting Problems on My Laptop

[MonsieurChortles]

Hi there, I'm experiencing troubles when booting from a CD with Knoppix v5.1 on my laptop. I'd like to know if anyone might know what's going on.
I burnt the Live CD recently and tried to boot from it. I get to the Knoppix boot prompt screen (where it says press enter to boot, or f2 or f3 for boot options), but when I press enter, it goes to a black screen and does not change or load. BIOS has been configured to boot from CD and all that Jazz.

I'm confident that nothing is wrong with the CD, because I successfully booted from a school computer and used Knoppix. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with my hardware. My laptop is:

Sager NP9262
Intel Core 2 Q6600
nVidia Geforce 8700M GT (two in SLI)
4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 2 X 2048MB


I'm not sure what information would be useful, so just ask for it and I'll pull it up. A technician friend of mine is convinced that it's the SLI causing the problem.

I'd like this problem resolved soon, so please respond.

Thanks,
MonsieurChortles

[Harry Kuhman]

...I'm confident that nothing is wrong with the CD, because I successfully booted from a school computer...

Did you burn the CD at high speed? If so the most likely problem is that there is indeed something wrong with the CD, and a low speed burn would likey either work or get a lot further.

If the CD was made properly at low speed then you might need one or more cheat codes. But usually you will see something after pressing enter (at least a penguin for each cpu on your system) if this is the case. See the cheat codes section of the wiki or the cheat codes file that you got with the download for more details.

[mattcallao]

You may wanna try testing your CD first to be sure that it's OK, try typing on boot "knoppix testcd"

[OErjan]

even if it passes [/b]testcd[/b] it may be marginal and SLOW or not work.
main reason is simply because so much of the data is not in the right place but still present.
I know it sounds odd but is true, simply put, if a part of the CD is bad the data is put elsewhere, this can confuse a system booting, and it is more likely the faster the CD was made.
I personally prefer 4X speed for my burns (my present burner wont go below that).

[twtt]

Your tech friend is right.
In my experience the dual graphics card setups usually don't work correctly with Knoppix.
It appears that everything works except that nothing makes it to the display. It all boots up eventually, and sits there waiting for you. but you can't see the output...

Sorry that I don't know of a workaround. Perhaps "Knoppix 2" and try to reconfigure the X from the command line?