The Chakra Project - Forums

AlexanderVanLoon

Apprentice

Registered: 2009-11-22

Posts: 12

bizarre: notebook doesn’t like Live USB, desktop does

I copied this post partially from my post on the OpenSUSE forum here.

I want to test four Linux distributions: Kubuntu 9.10, Fedora 12, OpenSUSE 11.2 and Chakra Alpha 4. I used Ubuntu's 'Startup Disk Creator', Fedora's 'liveusb-creator', the instructions for OpenSUSE here and the instructions for Chakra here to create four Live USB's from the iso files for all distributions.

First I verified that all four USB flash drives with each distro booted fine on my desktop PC. Kubuntu and Fedora also booted fine on my notebook.

When I wanted to test OpenSUSE 11.2 and Chakra Alpha 4, I encountered a bizarre problem. Both OpenSUSE and Chakra refused to boot when I used them on my Acer Travelmate 8371. I pressed F12 after I turned on the 8371 to enter the boot menu and select the USB flash drive, this worked fine with Kubuntu and Fedora, but not with the other two. The notebook would simply freeze at 'entering the boot menu' after pressing F12, same with pressing F2 to enter the BIOS.

I decided to upgrade the BIOS version of the 8371 to 1.18 in the hope that it would somehow fix the problem, this didn’t make a difference. I’m reasonably sure the specific USB flash drives were not the cause of this problem. A USB flash drive with OpenSUSE caused the notebook to hang first, but after I copied FreeDOS to it in order to update the BIOS it worked perfectly after pressing F12.

So does anyone know why the Chakra Live USB causes my notebook to hang when I want to select it as a boot device, but works fine with my desktop? What could I do to solve it?

Possibly I could use PXE to install over the network so I don't have to use a USB flash drive. Would these instructions for Arch Linux also work for Chakra? However, I'd prefer to use USB flash drives as using PXE is more complicated.

caelestis

Newbie

Registered: 2009-12-22

Posts: 5

Re: bizarre: notebook doesn’t like Live USB, desktop does

I have this same problem with my acer on my other thread.

philm

Manjaro Linux Developer

From: Germany, Garching

Registered: 2009-04-16

Posts: 4,508

Website

Re: bizarre: notebook doesn’t like Live USB, desktop does

try this windows tool: http://www.linuxliveusb.com/ or retry with alpha5-prev: http://chakra-project.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?id=2047

AlexanderVanLoon

Apprentice

Registered: 2009-11-22

Posts: 12

Re: bizarre: notebook doesn’t like Live USB, desktop does

Sorry for my late reply. Thank you very much for your advice Ammon82, I used Linux Live USB Creator to create a Live USB of the Capua development release ISO image. This time my notebook’s BIOS didn’t freeze when I tried to boot from the USB flash drive. I’ve only tried the combination of Linux Live USB Creator and the Capua development release; I’m not sure if the method using dd would work, or if it would work with alpha 4. Now that it works, I’m seriously considering to switch my notebook from Kubuntu Lucid (10.04 LTS) to Chakra as soon as alpha 5 is released.