Help loading Knoppix 4.0

**santacruz112** · 11-09-2005

Hello everyone I am new to this stuff but have been doing lotsssss of research. I recently downloaded the dvd iso image of knoppix and booted it onto my desktop and worked well except for the fact that it could not read my hardrives since i have them set up in raid with an nforce onboard crappy controller lol. If anyone knows how to mount the drives and read the data in knoppix without destroying it lemme know please lol? Besides that Ive been having problems booting that same cd onto my dell inspiron6000. It boots to the screen and after pressing enter and all that it runs through the normal detection and all that good stuff right after detecting my network cards i believe it says loading something which i take is the gui desktop (flashes through too fast to read it) after doing this the screen goes black and you can see a cursor in the upper left hand corner of the screen for roughly 10 seconds. After this the computer will hang and do absolutly nothing. Ive tried the commands knoppix ide =nodma, fb800x600 and also tried the function key on my latop for switching between lcd and monitor. I have not tested the cd but assuming that it ran perfectly fine in my desktop I imagine it is not corrupt.
Please help if anyone has any suggestions. I have spent hours on this.
PS Ive tried several times to install red hat on my laptop as well the burning the cd at 8x slowest i can, the cd will start the installer and ask me the first couple questions and when it ask me where the image is to be found, after selecting cdrom i get the error that a linux cd was not found!
For gods sake I just want any version of linux lol!!!!
I take it my cdrom drive and linux are not friends lol.
any suggestions will be extremely appreciated.thanks.
Josh

**AlexK** · 11-09-2005

I don't know about the raided drive on your desktop, but for your laptop, have you tried acpi=off option or noapic or asking it to load the vesa driver?

And for the RH you are trying to install, did you check the md5sum of the iso before burning using a program such as fsum in windows? Oh and if you are trying to install RH9 or earlier, just a warning, it is really outdated and won't support much of the newer hardware. I would suggest you give Fedora a try, the latest is Fedora Core 4, since some people find FC4 to be a bit buggy, try FC3 which is a lot more stable.

**nalg0rath** · 11-09-2005

To use RAID:
1. Boot the Knoppix CD.
2. Check raid support

Code:

cat /proc/mdstat

3. Edit your /etc/raidtab -file and add:

Code:

raiddev /dev/md0
        raid-level      0
        nr-raid-disks   2
        chunk-size      32
        persistent-superblock 1
        device          /dev/sd??
        raid-disk       0
        device          /dev/sd??
        raid-disk       1

But edit to your raid setup, raid-level is RAID mode and the devices is the partiti
ons that is in the RAID.
4. Run "cat /proc/mdstat" again to see if it is running
5. Mount the device

Code:

mkdir /mnt/md0
mount -t ntfs /dev/md0 /mnt/md0

On the laptop you can try to boot it in text only mode ("knoppix 2" at boot prompt)
and then manually edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 when you have edited it you can
run "startx" to start the XDE.

**santacruz112** · 11-09-2005

Thanks for the advice but still no go on the laptop I can boot it into text only mood however I do not know how to edit the files in order to boot startx....after typing startx it says "initiating start sequence" and the screen is black..it definitely appears to me as a video driver problem prob because I have a crappy onboard integrated intel video card. Does anyone know of any different video settings I can boot with to maybe make this work?

**AlexK** · 11-09-2005

To edit the X config file, simply do this:

Code:

nano /etc/X11/XF86&#91;TAB&#125;  <--- &#91;TAB&#93; = hit the TAB key

then goto the line which looks like (note, for you it may say Intel Extreme .... instead if GF2):

Code:

Section "Device"
  BoardName    "GeForce2 Integrated GPU"
  BusID        "2&#58;0&#58;0"
  Driver       "nvidia"
  Identifier   "Device&#91;0&#93;"
  Screen       0
  Option       "Rotate" "off"
  VendorName   "NVidia"
EndSection

In above line, change nvidia to vesa. Then save and quit.

Alternatively, when knoppix loads, you can tell it to use the vesa driver, but I can't remember the exact syntax. It should be available in the advanced list of options.

**samuraiBSD** · 11-09-2005

it's possible you may simply have a corrupted copy? Try the command line stuff, and if that won't work, just try a torrent instead.

**santacruz112** · 11-11-2005

Just tried installing Fedora Core 4 today....Same problem! once the gui starts up bam! blank screen i can toggel back and forth to the text console using alt f2 however I am not familar with linux console commands. I believe it did say however that it was using the vesa driver as it was loading. Any suggestions?
Thanks

**santacruz112** · 11-14-2005

anyone ? please?

**santacruz112** · 11-28-2005

aparrently no one wants to help me......

**newbie_lm317t** · 12-08-2005

I have had this problem tons of times. When it seems to hang (it is actually just putting out invalid display info that the screen can't take), hit:
ctrl-alt-F1
This gives you the tty1 terminal window that says ".......login: "
Login as root and edit the display settings to match those in the MS Windows settings:
vim /etc/X11/XF86Confiig

then restart X:
Either:
hit: ctrl-alt-F7 (This gives you the graphical display back that is malfunctioning)
hit: ctrl-alt-backspace ( this restarts the X-server)

OR:
type: pkill -9 X
hit: ctrl-alt-F7 (This gives you the graphical display back that is malfunctioning F7 maybe F6 or F8 depending on the distro)

If you need more help than can be found here, try posting in linuxquestions.org. They get alot more eyes than this forum.

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