Live-USB doesn't run on HP 625

[KaioShinDE]

Hey all!

An aquaintence of my father handed me his notebook and wants me to install a Linux on it. It's a HP 625, and it came with Suse Enterprise Linux 11 preinstalled - but somehow he destroyed that installation, it boots up with missing files. But he decided he doesn't like it anyway so I'm supposed to install something else. Of course I turn to Mint as I'm running it very satisfied on my netbook since version 8. This notebook is giving me trouble however, even though I would assume it has linux compatible components since Suse was preinstalled...

I don't know much about the hardware except that it has an Athlon II X2 320 and an Radeon HD 4200 graphics chipset.

I made an usb stick with the normal Mint 11 DVD image, 64 bit version. When it boots from either normal or compatibility mode it ends up on a black screen after a while. I already checked the stick file integrity, the built in check said it was fine.
I tried booting with nomodeset and it showed me some more debug info, but again it ended up on a black screen. Before that, one menu item in the boot process displayed a red "Failed" mark, "Load fallback graphics driver". I also read this notebook model has problems with audio. Well not nearly far enough for that yet, but just in case it had something to do with the booting problems I disabled the audio device in the BIOS. Didn't make a difference.

Any suggestions on how to proceed?

[xenopeek]

Okay, this is using buckshot, but you may try as boot parameters:

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nomodeset xforcevesa vga=normal acpi=off noapic nolapic

If this works, try to find out which combination of these boot parameters you actually need to boot. The less boot parameters you can use, the better.

The parameter "nomodeset" disables the kernel mode setting (tells the kernel to not set the graphic resolution, let X do that instead). The parameter "xforcevesa" enforces to use the VESA driver for X. "vga=normal" disables the framebuffer (instead of "normal" you may also try a number for one of the graphic resolutions).

"acpi=off" disables the "Advanced Configuration and Power Interface". "noapic" disable the "Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller". "nolapic" disable the local APIC.

[KaioShinDE]

Thanks!

It's still not booting, but I think it helped with diagnosing the problem. The booting still gets stuck, but instead of switching to a black screen it remains in the console, so I can see what the last actions were.

It stops at:

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Starting GNOME DIsplay Manager [OK]
Stopping enable remaining boot-time encrypted block devices [OK]

After that it just freezes. What would the next step in the boot sequence be? I guess the error must lie there.

[KaioShinDE]

Little update, I just tried Mint 9 and that seems to work perfectly out of the box. At least the Live USB booted up with no hickups. Sound is still disabled. I'll install it now and look how it goes.

It would still be nice if 11 would work somehow. Otherwise I'll just have to hope the owner doesn't somehow realize it's "not the latest version", because I don't think it will be fruitful to try to explain to him the advantages of LTE versions.