Unable to boot live CD

[bogstandard]

Hi there!

I have recently (ie today!) purchased a new computer (HP dx2250, Athlon X2 5000+, 2GB memory, 250GB SATA HD, SATA Lightscribe dvdr, 250GB IDE HD, ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 (I will be putting in an nvidia soon!)). On my old system I had Daryna running brilliantly but on this one I am struggling!

The Live CD boots up and starts to load up and then dumps me into a "Limited Shell" (BusyBox IIRC). I tried a few suggestions (No splash, noapic etc) and nothing helped. So I followed another suggestion and changed the SATA settings in the bios - success! Well kinda - Daryna boots but the display dances around the screen, Gutsy Gibbon just hangs and PCLinuxOS fails at the ethernet configuration stage.

Any ideas? Shall I just try all of the suggestions in the wiki?

Thanks,
Stu

PS Happy new year to you all!

[Husse]

There is nothing blatantly obvious I see that can cause this
So it's a HP?
Do you know which motherboard by any chance? I know it can be tricky to find that out in brand desktops...
But yes try whatever you find in the wiki.
It's a bit thin on the motherboard section - it's definitely not easy and not possible for me to test all variations - I would need to have tons of hardware...

[bogstandard]

According to sisoft sandra it is a MSI 0A7C.

[Husse]

It's really interesting to google that motherboard (MSI 0A7C)
The first hit is your post in Ubuntu forums and there are only 62 posts and only yours with gutsy in it.
The rest is mostly in non english pages, but the second hit indicates a problem with SATA, but this is an older kernel.
Furthermore all MSI mobos for AMD have a part number beginning with K, so this is an OEM mobo specially for HP which makes it really hard to find something out. Quite often these are stripped down versions...

[bogstandard]

Its getting on my nerves now - I wasn't going to dual boot at all on this one!
HP even sell it in Australia preloaded with Red Hat on it so it is compatible!

I'll have another try later on! Cheers Husse

[bogstandard]

Tried with boot option irqpoll (as suggested on ubuntuforums) and the boot hangs up at the splash screen with the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock lights flashing.

Tried setting the graphics to 1400x?x? with the irqpoll option and it booted further this time - it started to load gnome and nautilus and then fell back out to the regular login screen. It then just loops repeatedly!

[Husse]

I'm going to call in the reserves on this one, hang on

[bogstandard]

Right then, graphics card came yesterday so I fitted it today.

The cd now boots!!!

When the desktop loads up I get an error message (failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus_TgUAQLmjoA connection refused) and the lovely mint theme is missing. (I have uploaded a screenshot for you! http://files.mint-space.com/getfile,200 ... t.png.html

Any ideas?

[Husse]

No ideas. I got some help from my hardware specialist but he had only found out that the computer was problematic and that the video card was to blame. Have to think of this - and as you can boot check all kinds of settings and make a couple of boots (is that the right plural for boot? or is it some kind of shoes?)

[bogstandard]

Success!!!!!

Changed the SATA setting back to legacy from IDE and now Mint looks real good!

Well pleased now!

Thanks again Husse!

[Husse]

Well I did not contribute much here
To make this more usable for others could you please tell us which SATA setting you changed back to legacy from IDE
In BIOS I presume