I have tried to install both Mandriva 2008 PowerPack and 2008.1 from a DVD download. Both times on a clean disk. Both times the install was w/o problem until the initial boot from the HDD which stalled at "Setting up LVM" or "Checking Root Filesystem". Booting from a live CD (Mandriva One) dies at the same place.

My question is: has anyone out there sucessfully installed Linux on this machine? If so, how?

This one has me pulling my hair out and my frustration level is approaching max gross as I see myself forced back to VISTA.

Come on, experts, I really need help.

When you say "clean disk" do you mean newly created partitions? Are you using partitions from previous installation attempts? This would be a bad idea if yo have had problems.

This link may be of help also:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/ma...esystem-289490/

Thanks for your response. I tried all the suggestions in the link you provided with the same result as described above.

By "clean disk" I meant that for each install I let the installer erase the disk and auto-allocate the file space.

I'm still hung up on the fact that the "live" CD boot fails at the same spot - wouldn't that seem to rule out disk problems?

Also is there a particular message on the verbose boot that I should look for?

Try to install again, this time deleting any partitions from the previous installation attempts.

The "live" CD stalling at the same point tells me there is something wrong with the hard disk. Maybe removing the previous partitions will rectify this.

No joy.

FDISKed the disk twice, then did install. Same result.
Reinstalled putting GRUB on 1st partition rather than MBR. Same result.

The disk is SATA - could that be a factor?

it should not be... Check if yoyu can change the disk setting in theBios to "compatibility" - some thinkpads with sata drives need that.

What kind of laptop or/and motheroboard is this?
Do you have RAID enabled?

HP Pavilion dv9700
System board ID: 30D1
AMD Turion 64x2 TL-60
2.0Ghz
2048 Mb ram
Two 120G SATA HDD

RAID does not appear to be an option with this machine.

The MOBO SETUP function allows only minimal changes:
system time & date
passwords
allotted video memory
boot order (CD/DVD, HDD, USB disk)

I had problems with a lot of distros on my HP Business Notebook 6710b. I currently only have had two distros working on it, Gentoo and Fedora (albeit a network install, and not from CD/DVD). But it's working with Fedora 8 now.

Ubuntu wouldn't work on it.

Try booting with the following options appended to your boot line in grub:

irqpoll all-generic-ide

I tried the above suggestion. The verbose boot displayed a litany of errors and stopped after displaying "Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!"

I also downloaded and installed the latest Fedora distro w/64bit support. It booted but then died during the update process.

As I was checking my BIOS options, I noticed that booting from a USB disk was supported. I then installed PowerPack 2008 to a spare 40G USB drive. With this config the boot flew right past the previous problem area but died just after displaying "Enabling swap space... (OK)".