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Mandriva on HP dv9700 series laptop - impossible?


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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.

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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.

 

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?

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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)

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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.

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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)".

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