booting DSL hangs @ CPU detection

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: booting DSL hangs @ CPU detection
started by: firehelix

Posted by firehelix on Oct. 26 2005,04:03

well, I've had this problem now for a while, and before i thought it could have been because i was booting off my USB drive, but now that i got my hands on a cd and put the image on that, i know i have other problems. here was my original post with my problem.

I have an old laptop sitting around that I decided to play around with. It is a Toshiba Satellite Pro 470CDT. I am using a floppy USB boot disk, and the DSL image on a 128 meg attache drive. The computer boots fine off the floppy, it loads the drivers for the usb, and finds the image just fine. It creates the /ramdisk and it's directories and symlinks. It says "Starting init process." "INIT: version 2.78-knoppix booting" "Running Linux Kernel 2.4.26." "Processor 0 is Mobile Pentium MMX 199MHz" then it hangs. No activity on the floppy or USB drives and I've let it sit there like that for over 3 hours with no change. I've tried playing with some of the boot options such as: vga=normal, dma, failsafe, expert, different color/resolution combos, minimal, lowram, and install. The farthest it gets with any of the options is to the processor detection. Any ideas on how to get it to boot?

any ideas as to why it hangs? one thing i just noticed 2 seconds after i hit post... when trying to boot from the CD, when it hangs, the cd drive light blinks on and off at a steady interval.

Posted by newOldUser on Oct. 26 2005,16:11

All the older Toshiba's I've ever tried DSL on need the "nopcmcia" option on the boot line.

I think the pcmcia check comes right after the processor check.

good luck

Posted by Guest on Oct. 29 2005,04:59

In The BIOS, Use PgUp/PgDn to switch between the two pages.
Set (and note) the parameters for the various devices, in particular, the sound card.
On page 2, under PC CARD, set Controller Mode=PCIC Compatible, or the PCMCIA ethernet card won't work.