Laptops :: Dell inspiron 1720 - not booting

that's basically it. I've burned a CD of DSL (as slow as I could, x10) and tried to boot it in my Dell inspiron 1720. I currently have Ubuntu and Vista on the hard drive, but I wanted to test out my DSL cd. All other live CDs that I have work (Gentoo, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora).

I've also noticed this problem on my Dell Dimension E520(same hard drive setup as the inspiron except it has XP), but not on my dad's XPS 200 (which currently has an older version of Ubuntu on it, as well as XP)

All three computers have booted all other live CDs flawlessly, the desktops both use USB Mice and Keyboards, the laptop currently has nothing in it's USB ports.

is there a cheat code that I need to boot with to make it work?

You can boot with nousb to try booting with usb detection disabled.

I have a Dell Vostro laptop, and it displayed the same problems as your computers. I was able to get it to boot correctly by using the nousb option (and by not using the toram option

), but unfortunately the laptop still tended to freeze on shutdown. I've tried dsl-n with much better success except that my sata hard drive is not detected (dsl-n apparently does not support the sata cheat code). If you have an ide hard drive, or do not need to access your hard drive, you may want to try dsl-n at least until dsl is released with a 2.6 kernel .

Try the syslinux.iso I've got about four Dell cd drives that I have to interchange before one finally works, but the syslinux iso seemed to work the first time.

original here.