Live CD boots, works for a moment, then freezes

[JensH]

Hi,

I've come across a very strange behaviour. I wantet to try the live CD (Fedora-12-i686-Live-KDE.iso). It boots just fine, then works for a few minutes (not really enough to try anything out) and then just freezes. No reaction on any mouse click or keyboard stroke, not even Ctrl+Alt+F1 (for text console), Crtl+Alt+Backspace (to kill the X server) or Crtl+Alt+Del (for init 6). :confused:

Maybe it makes you feel better to know that the very same thing happens with the ubuntu live CD. So I guess this is not specific to Fedora but to some piece of the newer linux versions in general that doesn't work on my system. I'm running Suse 10.3 (about two years old) just fine but wanted to try other distros instead of just updating.

So - what info is needed to find the problem? I can't provide any log files since the system is just dead after such a short time. Does lspci help?

TIA

Jens

[metaylor]

Actually, I am experiencing the same thing using Fedora-12-i386-DVD.iso which I installed to my HDD. At least 8 of 10 times I have logged on, it demonstrates the same behaviour within 15 minutes.

[kumarkrishnan]

I too tried Fedora12-KDE Live CD. As soon as desktop appeares, My PC hangs. No keyboard, Mouse control, No Ctrl+Alt+Del or Ctrl+Alt+F1.
PC spec:
1. Intel Processor D 805.
2. Intel Motherboard D102GCC2 with 1.5GB of DDR2 and ATI Xpress 200 chipset along with X300 graphics.
3. Logitech wirless Keyboad and Mouse with PS/2 connectivity.

Kindly update if any soultion found.

[guitar player]

One thing you might want to do is check your download, because I have tried downloading fedora from different mirrors and bittorrent, yesterday and today and have not been able to get a good download. Also I don't think it as at my end because I have downloaded two different distros, just to make sure it was not something I was doing and have not had a problem.

[simpfeld]

Yeah I'm seeing this too on one system, if I boot without X (taking out rhgb and quiet and booting to init 3). It comes up and is happy, if I then start X is tends to drop out after a little while usually seconds/minutes. Either a freeze or a black screen. I'm using Gnome.

The main similarity to the other system mentioned is the video card is an ATI, specifically an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M.

[CSchwangler]

You could try and add nomodeset to the kernel line in the grub boot menu. This would disable kernel mode setting, which causes problems on some graphics cards.

[metaylor]

Allow me to reiterate that I am not using the ATI graphics card or chip, yet I see this issue with Fedora-12-i386-DVD.iso

Any thoughts?

[AlexDudko]

Same behavior with ATI Radeon Xpress 200M. It seems that the problem with this type of graphics card preserves unsolved since F10. Since then I had to switch to Ubuntu with causes no problem with graphics.

[sourinnandi]

Installation BLACK SCREEN <<<<SOLVED>>>>

In the BOOT Menu, Press TAB while highlighting "BOOT" Option

Just add "nomodeset" to the end of the text..This disables Kernel Mode Setting and F12 will be up and running....

I m posting this from F12.

[kosen]

I'm having similar issues with a Radeon Express X1100 graphics controller...

[royor]

Greetings,
I installed Fedora 12 live on a 16GB high speed (200X) flash drive.
The installation command line (my preferred way of doing things) was
taken directoy from
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo

and it goes like this:

su -c "livecd-iso-to-disk --format --reset-mbr /sdb3/linux.iso/Fedora/12/ Fedora-12-i686-Live.iso /dev/sdc

Well, I was able to boot it and it has very respectable speed.
BUT!!!!
During yum update, it freezes the GUI and crashes.

Is it WRONG to do yum update on Fedora Live ???

[JEO]

There is very little room on a Fedora live installation because it is designed to fit on a live cd (compressed squashfs filesystem, about 3 GB in size uncompressed) so there is a limit to the number of packages you can update. There is also a limit of the persistent overlay file size I hear some people have problems if it is greater than 4GB. Also the live cd uses syslinux boot loader and updating the kernel will call dracut which I think works with grub.conf but may have trouble updating syslinux.cfg

[royor]

There is very little room on a Fedora live installation because it is designed to fit on a live cd (compressed squashfs filesystem, about 3 GB in size uncompressed) so there is a limit to the number of packages you can update. There is also a limit of the persistent overlay file size I hear some people have problems if it is greater than 4GB. Also the live cd uses syslinux boot loader and updating the kernel will call dracut which I think works with grub.conf but may have trouble updating syslinux.cfg


Well, I read that minimum usb flash drive needed to install LiveCD on a USB is 8GB.
My stick is 16GB.
I also installed it on 8GB flash drive. I experienced exactly the same problem.

Another problem I experienced with both flash drives is a message that writing out
the journal failed. That's weird! The USB stick is formatted as a dosfs, and not ext3.
So, it is not clear which mount point ends up being an extr FS - since the machine
crashes before I can look.

All -n all, Fedora Live on USB stick is just NOT ready for prime time.

I will attempt to install Knoppix on a flash stick and see if that is stable.

Cheers,

R