Mandrake/Mandriva chokes booting up on Compaq Presario V2000

[Seren]

I've installed Mandrake/Mandriva 10.1 repeatedly on my new Compaq Presario V2000 laptop. The installation process itself goes smoothly, but Mandrake always becomes unresponsive during bootup.

If I don't hit "i" to go into interactive startup, it stalls after one of these five consecutive lines:

Initializing Fireware controller (ohci1394):
Starting netprofile:
INIT: entering runlevel: 3
Entering non-interactive startup
Start udev

If I do hit "i" and get into the interactive startup, I must hit "n" and enter after each prompted command. Otherwise, the system becomes unresponsive. When I reach the login prompt and put in a user name and hit enter, it may become immediately unresponsive, or it will prompt for the password, and after I put it in and hit enter, the system becomes unresponsive. I never get beyond this point the wtih bootup.

By unresponsive I mean that hitting different keys or combinations of keys might output something to the screen, and hitting enter will cause the cursor to go down a line, but none of that will make anything else happen. Well, with the non-interactive startup at those five bad lines, if I hit control-c and enter at one of them, I might get down to the next line before the systems hangs up, but that's it.

If I boot to failsafe, at the point that bootup switches to runlevel 1, the system becomes unresponsive.

Windows XP works well on it, so I don't think the laptop is malfunctioning.

So do any of you have an idea what this might be, or what would be a good next thing to try to get Mandrake working on this system?

[TheGreen]

Well, rather than run down the issues with 10.1, unless you are really wanting it, I would reccomend trying 2006 RC2. It will be for real soon, but the release canidate at this point is tight. I have not tried 2005 at all.

When I have had no luck with Mandriva on a perticular laptop, I use Mepis, which almost always works great.

But I would def. give 2006 a try. Its still in cooker I guess so be brave, but I am running on two systems and think its the best Mandriva yet.

If you continue wanting to try with 10.1 try noacpi and make sure your media is sound. Almost sounds like a bad install.

[Seren]

I think the media are fine, because I've used them to install on two other machines without incident. I don't have any attachment to 10.1, they're just the disks I have now. I'm not even particularly attached to Mandriva.

Interesting suggestions. I'll see what I can do with them.

Does anyone else have any ideas? I'm open to other distros for this PC.

[TheGreen]

here links for the one I mentioned and the other I use on slieghtly older hardware. Mepis is Debian Based, Vector is Slack based, both are great desktop versions.

http://www.mepis.org/
http://vectorlinux.com/mod.php?mod=u...=21&page_id=19

or go with Mandriva 2006.

Mant others, these are just what I have setlled on for lappys after testing many distros.

[Seren]

If you continue wanting to try with 10.1 try noacpi and make sure your media is sound. Almost sounds like a bad install.

I made sure as many daemons as possible wouldn't run, but my results basically weren't any better.

Thanks for the suggestions, and the links to the distros.

Now for a hoot maybe I'll try to get my Free BSD 4.11 CDs to install....

EDIT - Ack, it won't let me finish the install from CD. Which is a bit weird because it could see the CD drive up to the point that it asked me where I wanted to do the install from (after I had used the FreeBSD install CD to partition the disk. Hmmm, maybe it's just too old a version of BSD....