Almost no live-cds work on the laptop in my sig

[mike941]

The topic says it all. Ubuntu 7.10 was the last one that worked on my laptop. I was able to upgrade to 8.04 but that was the last one i could upgrade too(it's liveCD didn't work). I can't use automatic upgrade to upgrade to 8.10 because i messed up my grub installing a different distro on another partition. So is this a hardware problem or is it a problem with my dvd drive or what. After the first few failed live-cds i thought it was hardware incompatability but, now with almost every live-cd failing to get past the load screen i'm really wondering if this is a hardware incompatibility problem. I always use the 64-bit version of Linux. Is it possible to use the 32-bit version on my 64-bit machine and could only trying to install 64-bit versions be part of the problem?

[Zill]

...i messed up my grub installing a different distro on another partition. So is this a hardware problem or is it a problem with my dvd drive or what...

If you have managed to install a different distro on another partition then I doubt if it is a hardware problem. I suggest you try another live CD, making sure the md5 sum is correct and that the disk check runs OK. If the 64-bit version still has a problem then you could always try the 32-bit version.

If you want a really quick test of your hardware then just download DSL (50MB) and burn it to a CD. It may not have all the bells and whistles of Ubuntu but it will give you a quick confidence test that your hardware is basically good.

[stalkingwolf]

Are you using the same brand of media? Try cleaning your DvD.

Both have made a difference for me.

[mike941]

Can i try and install the 32-bit versions or would that be incompatible?

[Zill]

mike941: AIUI 32-bit runs quite happily on 64-bit machines, but as I only have 32-bit PCs I cannot personally verify this
Take a look at the following links for more info - and Google is your friend...

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/32bit_and_64bit

http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2007/11/26/32bit-vs-64bit-ubuntu-that-is-the-question/

[mapes12]

Have you tried the text based alternate installation: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/down...rors#alternate

One of my machines doesn't like the Live CD's and will not load any of them. But the alternate CD always works.