Unable to boot ANY Mint Debian live session (SOLVED)

[mint123]

I'm trying to install LMDE onto a 9 year old Sony Vaio PCG-GRV550 laptop. It's a 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM. There is currently no operating system on the hard drive now. It was wiped to zeros with Killdisk.

I cannot get the computer to boot from cd and it doesn't support booting from USB. LMDE XFCE and Debian Squeeze both show some optical drive activity (the light blinking) while going straight to a blank screen with blinking cursor at the top left. After about 5 minutes of this, the drive activity stops and still leaves me at the blank screen with cursor. LMDE Gnome (these are all i386 btw) actually tries to boot the live session. I can see the 10 second countdown to boot Mint with the wallpaper background. The Casper32 text at the top of the screen comes on, but then it goes through about a hundred buffer I/O errors before finally saying there are no commands left to execute.

All discs were burned in Julia amd_64 using Brazero, all the md5sums match and to top it all off, the original Sony recovery discs with Windows XP work just fine.

I'd REALLY like to get LMDE onto this computer. Does anyone have any pointers on what's going wrong here?


EDIT:
Provided I get a LMDE version going, is there a config file I can tweak so I don't need to see the GRUB screen on each reboot? This will be the only OS on the computer.

Thank you!

[wayne128]

try install k3b to your julia-64, then use it to burn another DVD at lowest speed.

[mint123]

Thanks for the K3b suggestion, it seems that made some progress but I still can't boot into a live anything.

What's different from previously is that now I see the 10 second automatic boot countdown and then the screen changes to black w/white lettering saying either just Loading, or Loading /casper/vmlinuz......

Both just hang at that point and after 20 minutes of just that text and the optical drive activity light staying solid, I concluded nothing further was going to happen. This is with the Gnome i386 iso.

Just today I installed LMDE Gnome 32 bit onto an new Linux convert's Dell Dimension Pentium 4 via usb so I know my iso image works. In K3b I set the burn speed to 4x and to verify the image and there were no errors during writing. Is the 512 MB of RAM too little to load the live session? I can't imagine that would be the case when the new install I did today was only using about 150 MB. (Gotta love LMDE!)

[wyrdoak]

I don't know why but I usually have better luck downloading the ISO from the torrent, I've only have a 30% success rate getting a good burn from the server, Might be something wierd in my Internet connection, torrent is how I got my ISO and I'm using a USB DVD burner for I have no DVD burner on the NetBook.

[wayne128]

try pull out hard disk

move to another laptop ( must have the same hard disk interface)

install Linux OS

move back to this laptop

[mint123]

The XFCE iso I had was torrented, so was the Debian Squeeze download. HTTP, FTP or torrent doesn't make a difference in my case now. Going from Brazero to K3b did but still didn't work in the end.

I'd have to buy some adapters to get this hdd (ata-6) to work with my current laptop which is sata 2. Even if I did do this, wouldn't the os install with all the needed drivers for the sata 2 laptop and leave pieces of hardware on the ata 6 laptop not functioning?

[SimonTS]

Do you have a floppy drive for that laptop? If you do then you can download PLOP - http://www.plop.at/en/home.html - and create a bootable floppy which will then let you boot off a USB stick. I far prefer USB as an install media, and find it to be far more reliable.

[mint123]

Do you have a floppy drive for that laptop? If you do then you can download PLOP - http://www.plop.at/en/home.html - and create a bootable floppy which will then let you boot off a USB stick. I far prefer USB as an install media, and find it to be far more reliable.

Thank you for that! An amazing little program, it booted Mint Debian from USB with no problems. Currently installing.