Live CD freezes on boot

[Sarnuial]

Well my ShipIt CD arrived yesterday... "oh joy!" I thought. I stuck it into the old Celeron machine I had been prepairing for it (400MHz PII equiv., 128Mb RAM), booted up, hit "Start or install Kubuntu" and... it froze ("oh woe") when it got to "Mounting root file system".

I tried this on two other machines in the house, a 700MHz Duron with 256Mb RAM and a 950MHz Thunderbird with 640Mb RAM. The Thunderbird did the same, but the Duron managed to get the loading bar right the way across, but then froze just past the login stage (the second time I tried I saw "login" flash across the screen).

I'm really at a loss for what to do. Here's what I've tried (on the Celeron):

• Different CD drive (the live CD for ReactOS now boots, so the first CD drive was probably faulty so I'm with the second one now)
• Different CD cable (no difference)
• No hard drive (ditto)
• Removed all expansion cards but the video card (ditto)

I let it sit for over 4 hours and nothing happened then either.

Trying more RAM isn't really an option, but I've run a cycle of MEMTEST86 and it comes out fine.

Any help is appreciated, I'm pretty much willing to try anything short of spending money

--- Sarnuial

[otisklt]

Re: Live CD freezes on boot

I had an issue with mine where it would get halfway thru the install process and halt... I ended up having to burn the iso of it at a lower speed like 4x or 8x to get it to work. If that printed cd repeatedly fails try to download the iso and burn it.

[Sarnuial]

Re: Live CD freezes on boot

It's a pressed CD but unfortunatily downloading it myself is not an option... I'm on 56k dial-up, the reason I ordered one in the first place. So you think it's the disc? I managed to do a disc check on the Duron and it came out fine.

--- Sarnuial

[otisklt]

Re: Live CD freezes on boot

I am not sure what else it could be... maybe wait a bit and see if someone with more experience has a say.

[Sarnuial]

Re: Live CD freezes on boot

Well now I know for sure it's not a bad disc - I tried the Thunderbird again and waited longer this time and it booted fine. The Duron still stops when it gets to about the stage when it would be starting the KDE, but I'm blaming that on my second video card.

As for the Celeron, I hit F6 and chopped "splash" and "quiet" off the end so I could see what was going on and I found that it was freezing for about 90 seconds after it probed for the USB ports and then the kernel panicked, saying that there was a "fatal exception in interupt". I tried debian-installer/probe/usb=false but for some reason it does nothing. There are no options in the BIOS for disabling the USB ports either. The only thing in there USB related (that I can see) is "USB Interupt", which can be either Enabled or Disabled. It is on Enabled by default, and Disabled makes no difference.

--- Sarnuial