install freeze's from boot

milhouse3254

I'm very new to linux..... I tested Zorin OS 4 on my desktop and installed the OS to my EHD and it worked great i loved the program durning the test period and decided to install it to my laptop as my new OS.

Heres my system specs:

Compaq presario 2100

Celeron 1.99ghz

512 ram

40 G HDD

Not sure about the GPU what ever is standard....

Heres the list of problems I've had...

when i goto boot from my disk drive i get the boot menu were it says "boot live" and ect when i goto hit enter or scroll down the computer freeze's. when i allow it to just "time out" and select the current selection it stops at "1" and freezes. i know the disk is good because i installed it on my desktop EHD

Also when i tried to use "Dban" the program also froze, thinking it was a problem with my laptop or the software i tried to use the windows system disks that i got if i wanted to reformate the HDD and it worked just fine.

I also tried installing Ubuntu OS and the same thing happened, i actually get a purple screen with a small keyboard = (picture of a "stick figure".) both were a picture, it also froze.

I could really use your help with this as im really wanting to install Zorin or ubuntu on my laptop as im tired of windows xp and tired of all the problems associated with it....

thanks

Milhouse

ben

Try to boot with a LiveCD on your laptop, I've just made a fresh install with Debian 6 and I may help you with it, give me some time if you want to try with something else.
Basically the idea is to understand what piece of hw causes the problem, I guess you may apply this hint to everything else.
Try to boot with a Debian Live CD (business card format: 40Mb is fine), when you see the installer boot menu just hit "tab" when you're on the first option ("Install") and you'll see boot parameters used for your system, on Suse for example you already have the boot parameters there and you may write directly in it, on other systems you may hit "ESC" or "TAB".
Then on boot leave parameters as they're but please add these:
noapic
noacpi (or acpi=off)
nousb

Few times you've troubles with buggy APIC or ACPI controllers, even messy USB root host few times. At least you need to have your machine booting, then you may fix the problem later with proper boot params or with a good kernel for your system

Another hint: on boot parameters you may have an option called "quiet | quiet=on | noverbose | ..." please remove it so you may see boot messages to diagnose your trouble.

Then post the messages here on the forum and we may help you to fix it in some way


Cheers from Bart

milhouse3254

i was using a live installer, for both ubuntu and zorin. also im not very familar with the command prompts of linux were and when would i enter those code lines?

but i will get a copy of debian tomorrow....

milhouse3254

found out that my laptop is having a problem with the debian based kernals.... so what would be a good OS that would be comparable to zorin os 4 but thats not debian based.....

how is fedora??

ben

try with Fedora Core then. If you're a newbie it could be a nice Idea to use it, also OpenSUSE is fine.
If you can try to post messages from Debian based distro to understand where the problem is, we may fix them as well