Live CD stops with the cow

[frostyboy]

I bought a magazine with Mint 7 disc supplied.
I ran mint from the disc and liked it, so installed it on my laptop.
My girlfriend is so sick of MS that she would like to try it on her laptop.
I gave her the disc and she rebooted with the disc in. The boot process progresed until the cow appeared with a $ prompt and went no further.
This did not happen when I ran it live at all, so I didn't know what to do.
I downloaded a fresh copy from here and then checksummed it and burned it at low speed.
The new disc boots to exactly the same point and then just waits for some words of wisdom......which I don't have.
I love the idea of linux and the layout of Mint, but as a long term windows user I am finding the change VERY hard to get my head around.
Also the lack of software for applications I can't live without is making windows seem very attractive.
For example, I can only find one or two extremely simplistic and ugly karaoke management programs, and none to use for my mobile phone in place of Samsung PC Studio.
Can some kind person please tell me how to get past the command prompt, and why I should need to, before my girlfriend frizbies the disc into outer space.

Thank you

.....frostyboy.....

[frostyboy]

Ok.....so no-one knows the answer to this problem.
Looks like I'm on my own. And I'd heard such good things about the community spirit.
I'll try and figure this thing out myself.
.....frostyboy.....

[richyrich]

It would help if you told us what make/model of laptop? What are the hardware specs? How much RAM ? More details please !

This did not happen when I ran it live at all

If you can run it live again, open a terminal and type lspci in a terminal, and post the output back here.

[Kaye]

Also, about your other comment, there is an alternative for nearly every Windows program. If you haven't found one yet, keep looking, it's definitely there somewhere.