Ever had a machine which can't load linux?

[/Zoran\]

I just encountered on an interesting predicament, i have a PC from a guy i know, and i can't open live cd/dvd, either from ubuntu, mint, pclinuxos, opensuse, debian several different versions (mint 7,8,10 same as ubuntu), the media is not damaged, reader is ok. Every time i select it to boot it starts loading the system and it freezes, error i receive is in most case this

kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block

The PC has intel pentium D processor 2.66ghz, 1 gb ram, 150gb sata drive and some pci graphics card to lazy to check which....

i tried playing around in bios with settings but it doesn't help.

I have the pc with me cause of some windows 7 problems, and i wanted to try and see if linux would work, but it doesn't, it would be cool to know why, but what i'm interested more, have you ever had pc which just couldn't load linux cd?

[inktitan]

No I haven't so this is weird to me. I have an old HP '95 era that has rum Mint 9 XFCE, Salix 13.1.1, and currently Debian 5. It of course runs Damn Small Linux. If your PC can't run Damn Small Linux you have a problem. Have you tried USB and CD/DVD?

[/Zoran\]

i only tried cd/dvds, i think that the machine doesn't allow me to boot from usb, cause i can't select it. I did search the issue a bit, and people usually have it after applying updates on existing installations. The only thing that comes to mind is to change the boot option, but i don't know to what and how.....

[jesica]

Imposible

it is not the pc at all

something is wrong with the bootloader you are using

[jesica]

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1639198

[/Zoran\]

I have seemed to found the culprit

The computer has integrated intel graphics card, so i removed the card which was in the AGP interface:

Specs written on it
Ati radeon r9250 128mb 64bit ddr AGP VGA\TVO\DVI-I

and plugged the monitor on the integrated card and guess what, mint 10 dvd loaded without a problem....
I don't know if there is a solution for this, except of course not using that card...

This kinda makes me feel bad, cause i thought linux would work on majority of the machines, unless there is some other solution for this?

[beefstu]

Did you try the compatibility mode of the CD? Its likely that there's a parameter to pass to the kernel at boot to make it work, possibly "nomodeset" but I think that's more for nvidia cards.

[inktitan]

[quote="/Zoran\"]I have seemed to found the culprit

The computer has integrated intel graphics card, so i removed the card which was in the AGP interface:

Specs written on it
Ati radeon r9250 128mb 64bit ddr AGP VGA\TVO\DVI-I

and plugged the monitor on the integrated card and guess what, mint 10 dvd loaded without a problem....
I don't know if there is a solution for this, except of course not using that card...

This kinda makes me feel bad, cause i thought linux would work on majority of the machines, unless there is some other solution for this?[/quote]
Well...is the card any good? a simple malfunction in a single component on that card and it could jeopardize anything. Also Linux can run on almost any machine being the hard drive,ram,integrated components and motherboard but graphics cards and wifi adapters that are after-market or added features are not guaranteed.

[/Zoran\]

Did you try the compatibility mode of the CD? Its likely that there's a parameter to pass to the kernel at boot to make it work, possibly "nomodeset" but I think that's more for nvidia cards.

Yes i did it didn't help....

And i don't really know if the graphics card is any good, i'm not much of a gamer and like i said it's my friends machine...
whats interesting that i on my pc have ATI card
01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV535 [Radeon X1650 Series] (rev 9e)

and it works perfectly, but then again i don't have an integrated card, maybe that's whats troubling linux....
well anyway main thing is that i now know what could cause such problems in the future, it's good to know such things...