Getting far into boot...then nothing.

[carouac]

Okay...so testcd seemed to fail for me...which is odd considering how far along I got in the boot. The CD didn't seem to work in the other machine I tried it on(A fairly new HP laptop...maybe about 2-3 years old).

Does sound like the disc is bad. I'm not 100% convinced that a disc is good even if it does pass the test, but if it fails either the disk is bad or you have a hardware problem. You didn't mention if you did the md5 test. Again, should not be needed with a torrent download, but given your current status I would suggest doing it before the next burn.

So I'll be burning another copy sometime this week. Do you recommend I use Nero? I don't currently own it, but I should be able to aquire a short term copy easy enough.

I would not go so far as to say that Nero is needed. It just does have a nice verify feature that is handy, does a read after the burn and that occasionally catches things. Actually I've bookmarked a couple of other free burning programs that I still want to get around trying, but since I have Nero I tend to use it. I don't know what Nero's current policy is, but they used to allow a download of a fully featured 30 day trial. May be worth checking out even if you decide to try other software later. I'm certainly not suggesting that you buy Nero, I think it is overpriced for what it is unless you get it thrown in with a drive, and the company seems to be more interested in adding bloat than in slimming down the product to something useful and making it more affordable.

By the way, if you are burning a CD, you are using 700 meg media and not 650 meg media, right?

And aside from that...would the Power Save feature be a problem? I noticed on both machines I tried that the Power Save feature would kick in and the monitor would go black until I hit a key. I'm wondering if that has any bearing.

I don't see power saving being an issue, you should certainly be completely booted before it even kicks in. If we are talking about a BIOS feature and you have any doubt, can't you disable it?

I haven't done the md5 test yet. How would I go about that? Like I said, I'll try burning a new disc. If it's hardware, my only ideas are a loose RAM chip or something. Everything in there is around a year old, or less.

I am indeed using 700MB discs. And I'm pretty sure I can disable powersave. I'm almost positive even Knoppix has a cheat code for it. But like you, I doubt that's the problem.