I’ve got a live cd and I would like to install opensuse onto my laptop. I can boot from the cd but only to the first menu if I try to boot into opensuse or install it loads the linux kernel and then I get the open suse splash screen but then it goes to a terminal and it says it couldn’t detect my cd or usb and then it reboots. My laptop has a removeable cd drive maybe this is the problem? There’s gotta be some way to get around this yes? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
By removable - do you mean external USB drive?
Also, have you used the option on the CD to check the md5sum ?
And which liveCD exactly, downloaded from where?
It does read like you have a CD/DVD burn problem. But even after you sort that, you may still have a problem.
I think your acer travelmate 370 has an Intel 855GM graphics. Selected laptops that implemented that 855GM (such as my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo 7400M) have a problem with every Linux kernel since around version 2.6.28 or 2.6.29 or so. One needs 2.6.27 kernel or earlier to boot without problems.
The problem still exists in openSUSE-11.3 milestone-6, with bug report here: Access Denied
The problem was also reported in openSUSE-11.2 with bug report here: Access Denied
IMHO you best bet is to download openSUSE-11.1 while it is still available (from here: Software.openSUSE.org download for openSUSE-11.1 ) and install 11.1. Its not a pleasant situation, as I have seen no evidence yet of any distribution adopting the fix that “might” be available for this problem with the Intel 855GM chipset and the newer kernels/xorg and the Intel driver.
If you wish to keep trying 11.2, once you sort your CD/DVD download/burning problem, try booting with the boot code: acpi=off And even with that boot code, the behaviour of the Intel driver is poor, which is another reason to avoid a newer kernel with that 855GM. And hence I recommend openSUSE-11.1 for that Intel chipset.
Am I correct in thinking the Acer TravelMate 370 is circa 2004 and has an external IEEE 1394 (FireWire) optical drive?
Can openSUSE boot from FireWire?
Hey thanks for all the replies.
Yea its a firewire drive is that a problem?
I downloaded the gnome live cd from the opensuse website a couple days ago so its the newest one available I think.
I have ubuntu on the laptop now but I tried to upgrade and it just screwed everything up so I thought I’d give opensuse a try since I have to reinstall anyways. So if ubuntu worked without problems opensuse should work shouldn’t it?
I will try the md5sum and see what it tells me.
Indeed and I suspect the update was messed up because the newer kernels do not work with the 855GM Intel graphics. I suspect you had Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty (with the 2.26.28 kernel) or Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid (with the 2.6.27 kernel) or an older Ubuntu version. Any Ubuntu newer than those and IMHO you are in serious risk of problems with the 855GM graphics.
Try openSUSE-11.1 like I recommended above.
Alright I went and got some cds and downloaded 11.1 and burned it and booted up and it does the same thing. Tried the failsafe option too same thing.
Some silly questions - but they need to be asked … Did you do an md5sum check of the downloaded CD, and did you compare that to the md5sum posted on the web site? Were they the same ?
Did you burn to a CD +R or a -R (not to an RW as they are notorious for causing problems) at the slowest speed your burner allows ? And given the Travel Mate 370 is very old, are you certain the CD drive on this PC is not out of calibration ? Did you burn from the same PC ? or from another PC with a CD burner of similar age/vintage?
Good to check the MD5SUM but to help the OP, I think a quick answer to a question I posed earlier would be helpful:
Can openSUSE boot from a Firewire CD drive?
If not would the OP be better off seeing if the Travelmate can boot from a USB stick and then DDing the CD iso to that?
If he is seeing the “failsafe option” (and he says he is) does that not mean that it can boot from the drive ?
No I don’t think so. From my experience with recalcitrant MBs of the ASUS variety, the overall boot process is in three stages:
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BIOS boot process will allow you to reach the GRUB boot loader and the Menu.
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After selection of a Menu entry, GRUB then launches the kernel with the parameters so that the kernel knows which partitions to access. However, that only provides ‘names’ of partitions, not how to access them. At that point GRUB bows out and it is all up to the kernel.
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The first thing the kernel has to do is re-discover all the hardware including IDE drives, SATA drives, USB devices etc on its own terms. If it cannot, then it throws an error and may re-boot.
FireWire was made an integral part of Windows XP, which is why you can probably boot the XP installation disk from a FireWire drive. However, the same is probably not true of Linux and, even with later Windows OS’s, FireWire has fallen out of use, since USB 2.0 onwards is just as fast.
But we need a hardware GURU to check my expose above, which may be inaccurate.
So theres a pretty good chance this is not going to work for me? I really wanted to try opensuse. Should i just stick with ubuntu though?
The fact that you have or had Ubuntu on the system already, gives some cause for hope. Was that installed from the CD drive? If so my theory that the FireWire CD cannot be used to install Suse may be wrong and there is some other cause. Could be that Ubuntu has Firewire detection built in but Suse doesn’t. Could be that Firewire was taken out of later versions of Ubuntu and that was why the upgrade/update of Ubuntu didn’t work. I guess that was why I wanted a hardware GURU to comment on my theory in my last post.
It sounds from what you say in your first post that Suse cannot detect your CD drive. When it starts to boot from the CD have you tried to press Esc on the keyboard to get to the boot up diagnostics screen? Can you then freeze the process by pressing Ctl-S (resume with Ctl-Q I think) and note down precisely what it says?
Do you know if it is possible to boot from a USB stick? Does the BIOS have an option to set the first boot device to USB? If so there is a method of DDing (cloning) the CD iso to a USB stick and booting from that. If not, there used to be an old method of starting a boot process from a floppy but that may no longer be available. There was a previous post on this issue.
Or, since it is a shame not to at least experience Suse 11.2 or 11.1 (your graphics card may be a problem) why not try installing Suse under VirtualBox as a VM with a.n.other OS as the host (Windows XP even). If you love it then we can pursue the problem of booting the CD further. If you hate it then you have saved yourself some time.
HTH
You need a CD that will work.
From the read of this thread you did NOT check the md5sum of the downloaded web site against the md5sum on the web site. Hence you could have a bad CD.
Also, when you burned the CD, did you burn to an R+ or R- at the slowest burn speed possible? Do NOT burn to an RW as those are known to increase the probability of a bad CD. Burning at the slowest speed possible is also essential to increase the probability of a good CD burn.
My view is you have a bad CD.
I also think that even IF you had a good CD, it would still not work because of the 855GM graphics. Take a look at this thread: Intel GPU 8xx issues, will 11.3 have them too?! - openSUSE Forums
The 855GM problem affects ALL new kernels and only recently are solutions being brought forward to the 855GM problem. As I noted above, the 11.1 liveCD should work, but it will NOT work if it was a bad download or if it was burned poorly to a CD.
well if it is in fact a bad cd when I select the test installation media option from the boot menu shouldn’t it test the installation media instead of not being able to detect the cd drive? Seems to me like its probably the firewire drive thats the problem. I downloaded linux mint as well and burned it in OSx with disk utility just like both the openSuse cds I’ve tried and its working.
I’ll try doing some more fidling with the boot process. I know there was an option for booting from an external drive but I dont know about usb I’ll have to check that too.
And if all else fails how do I go about using VirtualBox ?
thanks again guys I appreciate the input.
Possibly, but not for certain. If the CD is corrupt, how can it test itself in all cases ? It depends where the error is located.
whiteflameglass, What is so hard about checking the thing?
How do I check the thing? If I knew how maybe I would consider checking it.