live cd shows strange start menu, stops booting

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi,

I am trying to install openSUSE 11.0 on a C3VCM6 motherboard. This board has a VIA C3 800 Mhz CPU, and the VIA CLE266CE chipset.

When I boot from the CD, I don’t get the nice green background: I only get a list of options, which I have to type in manually to boot from. Both normal boot and safe boot will stop just after detecting keyboard and mouse. That is before the kiwi init scripts start kicking in.
If I add pci=norouteirq to the kernel options, it will go a little further in booting, by starting the md detection. I then stops with the message it can’t find the root device.

So what’s happening here? Does anyone know why the shiny green openSUSE background is not shown? Or any suggestion on kernel parameters I could try?

2

I found an entry on the Gentoo wiki on the board I have:
HARDWARE VIA - Gentoo Linux Wiki

Could it be possible that the kernel of the installer doesn’t recognise my CPU as it should?

3

Are you using a live CD or a install DVD - just clarify please
Also, have you tried any other distro’s? With or without success.

4

I have only tried the KDE4 live CD, not the DVD, as I don’t have enough bandwith to download the DVD. The machine has the same problem with openSUSE 10.2 I have been told. openSUSE 10.1 does not have that problem. I haven’t tried other distro’s yet.

5

Pressing F1 at the boot screen should bring up help menu
F5 I think goes to kernel options
Can you access these functions?
Have you tried noapic
or
Installation - ACPI Disabled

or

If the graphical boot menu doesn’t show or freezes, try press and hold Shift on the keyboard when booting the installation media. This starts the text-mode boot menu instead.

6

No, the graphical menu doesn’t show, only a text menu. I can only manually type commands, and not select anything with the arrowkeys.

Have you tried noapic
or
Installation - ACPI Disabled

Yes, tried the safe settings option

or

If the graphical boot menu doesn’t show or freezes, try press and hold Shift on the keyboard when booting the installation media. This starts the text-mode boot menu instead.

It seems to boot the text-mode boot already. It boots, but stops before starting all the KIWI things, just after the keyboard and mouse detection

7

This is the exact message I get when using noapic (or pci=noacpi)

VFS cannot open root device “<NULL>” or unknown-block(8,9)

Please append correct “root=” boot option