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#1 2013-04-09 03:41:42

WyoPBS
Member
From: Cheyenne, WY
Registered: 2007-10-05
Posts: 101
Website

[solved] Haven't been able to boot from Live CD for a year

I should probably post this in the newbie corner.  I have been using Arch happily for about 6 years now, and I have been pretty good about keeping it updated over the years...  but after some 16 years of running various flavours of Linux, I'm still completely clueless about hardware and drivers.

The last time I installed an update that didn't crash my system was May of 2012.  I have periodically downloaded new distros (the latest being 2013.04.01) and for whatever reason, the UEFI boot thing hangs when it starts loading the kernel.  I'm not about to install any more upgrades onto my HDD until I can at least get a liveCD to boot properly.

System is a cheap Lenovo I got for under $500 a few years ago... Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-A75M-D2H with quad core AMD A6-3600; HDD is WD Caviar SATA 500GB (lspci tells me the controller is in AHCI mode, whatever that means); video card is the onboard Radeon 6530D.

Any suggestions on how I can at least diagnose the problem?  It gets as far as the boot menu, then my monitor says there is no input signal and shuts itself off.  So I can't see any error messages (if there are any), and when I reboot from the installed kernel on HDD there's nothing in the log or in dmesg because the new boot overwrites whatever was previously in dmesg.

I've said for years that Arch is the best of the bunch, and every time I went to a new distro I regretted it and came back to Arch... but if I can't get past this, I guess it's time for me to hang my head in shame and give up.  I can't keep using an outdated kernel, when half my app updates require newer kernels. Help!

Last edited by WyoPBS (2013-04-11 14:13:04)


Peter B. Steiger
Cheyenne, WY

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#2 2013-04-09 05:02:36

WonderWoofy
Member
From: Los Gatos, CA
Registered: 2012-05-19
Posts: 8,414

Re: [solved] Haven't been able to boot from Live CD for a year

Try a USB instead?

It sounds as though you are using UEFI, is this the case?  If so, do you have legacy bios booting enabled?

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#3 2013-04-09 05:23:14

scar
Member
From: Hungary
Registered: 2009-10-01
Posts: 442

Re: [solved] Haven't been able to boot from Live CD for a year

When your machine boots from the livecd, hit TAB and append:

vga=769

to grub's line and boot it. It sets the monitor resolution to 640x480x8.

Also, the new livecd has an automatic root login scripted, so if you launch sshd "blindly", you can connect to your machine wit another one and see your logs.


“The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.”
― William Gibson

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#4 2013-04-09 20:35:41

WonderWoofy
Member
From: Los Gatos, CA
Registered: 2012-05-19
Posts: 8,414

Re: [solved] Haven't been able to boot from Live CD for a year

^^^ I guess that does raise the question of just how far into the boot do you think the machine is actually getting.  Nevermind what you can see, is it actually stalling after the gummiboot screen (or syslinux if you are booting non-uefi), or is it simply continuing yet without supporting the video card.

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#5 2013-04-09 20:51:45

lucke
Member
From: Poland
Registered: 2004-11-30
Posts: 4,018

Re: [solved] Haven't been able to boot from Live CD for a year

Try appending "nomodeset" to the bootloader's kernel line.

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#6 2013-04-10 04:57:47

WyoPBS
Member
From: Cheyenne, WY
Registered: 2007-10-05
Posts: 101
Website

Re: [solved] Haven't been able to boot from Live CD for a year

WonderWoofy wrote:

Try a USB instead?
It sounds as though you are using UEFI, is this the case?  If so, do you have legacy bios booting enabled?

I have no idea.  I downloaded the live CD and tried booting from it.  Looks like some of the mode options in other replies might help, so I will try them.


Peter B. Steiger
Cheyenne, WY

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#7 2013-04-10 07:35:50

Jasa
Banned
Registered: 2011-08-05
Posts: 41

Re: [solved] Haven't been able to boot from Live CD for a year

Have you checked your bios settings and tried some alternative values for those ?

As in Gigabyte board i have around has an AMD C1E feature available, when turned on it causes most Linux distributions to have an issue to boot system forward.

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#8 2013-04-11 14:12:38

WyoPBS
Member
From: Cheyenne, WY
Registered: 2007-10-05
Posts: 101
Website

Re: [solved] Haven't been able to boot from Live CD for a year

nomodeset did the trick; vga=769 did not help.  @Jasa, there are approximately 32,768 bios settings to check and I wouldn't know what does and doesn't make Linux happy.  Where would I find the AMD C1E feature?  Is that the only setting that breaks Linux?  Also bear in mind, with my May 2012 grub+kernel there are no problems, so if that's the case then something has changed in either the bootloader or the kernel over the past 12 months.


Peter B. Steiger
Cheyenne, WY

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