Sabayon Linux "locks up" during live cd trial and installation - help

[uberloungedotcom]

I was able to startup in the live cd trial mode of Sabayon Linux the other day and ever since I restarted the computer I have not been able to get back to using it. This is the same for all the options such as install the GUI or run from CD/DVD (have tried both mediums).

The computer is:
Dell PowerEdge 400SC 2.8GHz P4 800fsb
4GB DDR PC3200
Geforce 4 6200 256MB
250GB SATA HDD
16x Pioneer DVD- DL Burner
etc etc.

If anyone knows what the heck may be happening, please let me know. It is located on my main system whcih I obviously stinks right now since I can't use it. Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[drag]

So you were able to boot up the live cd version of Sabayon Linux.

you rebooted...

And now you can't boot it up the live cd version of Sabayon anymore?


What did you do that changed?

 

[uberloungedotcom]

The funny thing is, I didn't change a thing... well... actually I restarted the system because I plugged in my brand new iBook via the USB but after it didn't book, I removed the drive. But to give you a little more history, the system didn't boot the first time I tried it and I reburned the DVD which worked. So, after it didn't work anymore again... I just burned the 697MB file to CDR and tried that... no luck either.

It's especially making me go so crazy since I've been watching all the Beryl and AIXGL videos of it and I had it working for a second which was just amazing. I am too stoked to get back on that uber OS so any info you can supply me is much appreciated.

 

[drag]

What do you mean by 'not boot'.

The machine has no power?
You pop in the cdrom and it gets to the BIOS and hangs there?
It gets to the boot loader?

There are more then a dozen different things that could cause a machine to 'not boot', giving some error or explaining what is going on will probably get you a better response. I have no idea what is going on here.

 

[drag]

Probably at this point it would be easy to burn a knoppix cdrom and see if you can boot using that.

 

[uberloungedotcom]

i will be right back with the error I am getting.

 

[uberloungedotcom]

I went to verbose mode:
first thing it said was:
ibm_acpi: ec object not found
ata2 port failed to repond (30 secs)
srst faialed status 0xff
srst failed err_mask=0x100
srst failed status 0xff.....
so on so forth
LOADED A BUNCH OF STUFF, LOOKED POSITIVE, THEN THIS
squash error: sb-bread faile reading block 0x12d9c
squash error: unable to read fragment cache block [4b60d5e]
squash error: unable to read page, block 4b60d5e, size 6391

And that's where it stops. Thanks for your help. You're the man.

 

[drag]

Squash is probably refering to 'Squashfs', which is a compressed read-only file system used in Linux live cdroms.

When it's says 'failed reading block' it means that it's not able to read a section of the file system.

When you burned the second dvd did it fail on the same block numbers?

If it failed on the same blocks on both burns then you could have a bad ISO image. If you downloaded it via bittorrent this is not likely to happen as bittorrent does a running checksum as it's downloading the file. But if you downloaded it over ftp or http then part of the image could of been corrupted as it was downloaded. There are usually 'md5sums' file that is a plain text file that contains the checksums of the iso image, usually it's located in the same directories or website were you downloaded the image from.

In linux you usually have the md5sum program pre-installed, to check the integrity of the image you run:
md5sum some.file.image.iso

Then compare the resulting number to the reference one. If they match then you know you downloaded it correctly.


Then if your running linux you can check the cdrom you burned also...
md5sum /dev/cdrom

That will take a while, but if you got the correct number back then you probably have a good burn.

For windows there is md5sum.exe program to do the checksum, but I don't know how to check the cdrom itself to see if it burned correctly.

If you can't check the cdrom (or dvd.. same difference) or it's a bad burn then try it again. Burn it at a slow speed.. the faster the burner runs the more likely it is to mess up.

Also it's very important to check to make sure that DMA access is turned on for the both the harddrive and the dvd burner. It's nearly impossible to get good reliability with a burner if it has DMA disabled.

You can check in Linux with the hdparm application. Like:
sudo hdparm /dev/cdrom
sudo hdparm /dev/hda

or whatever.

With Windows you'd have to go through the device manager somewere.

 

[Nothinman]

So you've got some bad hardware, since it read the disc once it's not likely that's the problem so my first guesses would be the DVD drive or the cable to which it's attached.

 

[uberloungedotcom]

Thanks for everyone's help. I am going to download and burn another CD image, not DVD this time and see if ti works. If it does not work and the integrity of the CD images checks out, I will try swapping the drive and then the ribbon.

Thanks for everyone's help once again.