Weird issues- will not load liveCD

[farmersdaughter]

I'm planning on switching distros so this really scares and concerns me. Every time I try to boot from the Main edition liveCD, I get to the splash screen and then when it should go past that, it gets stuck. I have to then force Power Off. The md5sum is correct and I burned the CD the same way I burned it for the OS that I am running right now (CrunchBang 9.04). What is going on? The same thing happened when I wanted to try out Peppermint OS One (partly based on Mint). For either of these distros I can not even get a Virtualbox machine to run. I did check the integrity of the CD and it came up as good. I'm going to try my Ubuntu 9.04 CD later this week, I know it works, I installed it last year. The laptop I am using is a year old Asus K14 with Nvidia graphics and AMD64 architecture.

[vincent]

Running from a Live CD can be slow at initial bootup since your computer has to read the files on the CD to boot into a Live session, and CD's are of course slow compared to an actual hard drive. How long did you wait before powering it down?

If it just freezes even after waiting for more than a dozen minutes, let's say, press the Escape (Esc) button on your keyboard to kill the splash and see the output of dmesg. Write down letter for letter any suspicious error messages you may see, and post back here.

Alternatively, at bootup, press any button when it says "Automatic boot in 10 seconds", which will show a Grub menu. Pressing Tab on your keyboard lets you modify the boot options, so do that and at the end of the line that starts with linux, get rid of the words "quiet splash" and add on "nomodeset" instead. Then bootup and see if it works, all the while keeping an eye for any suspicious error messages you see.

[muzzargh]

I had the exact same problem.

First I created a boot USB key, go here: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/

Then I did this: ( I adapted this from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Bugs/Lucidi8xxFreezes)

From the LiveCD:

1) At the boot option screen press TAB to edit option 1

2) Add "i915.modeset=1" after "quiet splash".

3) Press Enter to boot the LiveCD.

From an installation:

1) Hold down Shift while booting to enter the GRUB menu.

2) Press 'e' to edit.

3) Add "i915.modeset=1" after "quiet splash".

4) Ctrl+x to boot.

If adding "i915.modeset=1" to your boot parameters allows you to boot successfully, you then need to enter these commands into a terminal to make the changes permanent:

echo options i915 modeset=1 | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915-kms.conf
sudo update-initramfs -u

I now have Isadora installed

[farmersdaughter]

Thanks will try. Not one out of the 4 distros I have tried will boot. I have a solution as back up but I'm not quite ready to resort to that yet. Will try.

[Midnighter]

What hardware are you trying to boot on?

[farmersdaughter]

Asus K40 with a Nvidia GeForce G102M graphics card, 4GB RAM, Nvidia MPC79 chipset, Atheros wireless and Realtek etho. Boots fine with CrunchBang 9.04, had issues with Ubuntu Jaunty, boots a VM of Vector Linux 6. Will not boot (LiveCD or VM) at all the following: Peppermint OS One, Mint 9 Main, and Fedora 13 Gnome. I have no clue what is wrong. Right now I'm settling for remastering my CrunchBang with updated repositories but leaving the kernel alone for the most part. The freeze is the exact same for all the distros, right after the splash screen disappears and the desktop should load. I left it for 12 minutes and nothing changed. Have not tried Esc and changing the commands.

ETA I might wait a while for the offical LXDE release. I have had some rather unpleasant issues in the past with Gnome and right now the common denominator between all of the releases that do not work is Gnome. Thanks again for all the help!