Live CD of Fedora 13 fails

[Collywobbles]

Hi,

I have Ubuntu 9.10 on my system and I am trying to run a LiveCD of Fedora 13 (from Linux Format). However, it fails too boot correctly.

Firstly, I have added acpi=off and removed the "quiet" option which got the boot a little further but eventually stops with:

No root device found.
Boot has failed, sleeping forever.

I'm guessing this means it doesn't know where to boot from. I next tried pressing F12 at BIOS screen to force CD-ROM as first boot device, but this doesn't help either.

I've no idea what else to try.

Thanks for any help!

[CSchwangler]

Does it start to boot from the CD? If yes, I would suspect a somehow damaged CD. Another idea would be that booting from CD is disabled in the BIOS.

[Collywobbles]

It does start to boot from the CD. I have now tried the LiveCD on my old Dell Inspiron 2650 Laptop that runs Lubuntu. The LiveCD worked fine so it's not a faulty CD.

My desktop where the LiveCD fails is:

Core2Duo 4400
4Gb RAM
ATI X1950 Graphics Card
1TB Samsung HD (partitions for Ubuntu 9.10 & Windows XP)
Sony CD/DVD RW

[CSchwangler]

Can you try to change the boot order in the BIOS? According to this post, that may be a solution to this problem.

http://www.linuxreaders.com/2010/05/26/fc-13-12-live-cd-boot-error-no-root-device-found-fix/

[Zanpactou]

You may need to disable scsi mode and enable ide mode for your hard drive(s) in the computer's bios because it could be a bug in the scsi driver your machine uses or there isn't a scsi driver for your card, if your disks are scsi.

Thanks,
Zanpactou

[Collywobbles]

OK - I've tried changing the boot order as suggested in the link, but it doesn't help. It was set to boot CD-ROM followed by HDD with 3rd option disabled.

I changed it to boot USB-CD, CD-ROM then HDD in that order, but it still errors with the same message.

I don't have SCSI drives, only SATA.

[Zanpactou]

I don't have SCSI drives, only SATA.
Ah, that could be it. Do you have an ide mode in the bios for the sata drives?

I remember having to change to ide mode in one of those Acer net top things to get Fedora to boot myself a while back.

Thanks,
Zanpactou

[Collywobbles]

Ah, that could be it. Do you have an ide mode in the bios for the sata drives?


I checked in the BIOS and there is a SATA/IDE mode option. It is currently set to IDE. Other options are AHCI and RAID/IDE.

[Zanpactou]

I checked in the BIOS and there is a SATA/IDE mode option. It is currently set to IDE. Other options are AHCI and RAID/IDE.
Ah, yeah. Start playing with that. :D
I doubt that the raid setting will be much use, but try the AHCI and SATA settings, to see if the kernel will see the disk.
I think that AHCI is USB, so it likely isn't that one but switching it to SATA mode might work.
If not, it was worth a try.

Thanks,
Zanpactou

[stevenhr]

Can you boot from other live CDs, just not F13?

I've found that some drives are more, shall we say "sensitive" than others. Sometimes I have better luck with DVD+R media even though I'm using a CD-sized image.

[Collywobbles]

Can you boot from other live CDs, just not F13?.

Hi Steven,

I have now had a go with an Ubuntu 10.04 LiveCD and that won't boot either although the problem is different. It gets to the splash and then drops me to an initramfs prompt with a few available commands.

It seems to be running BusyBox v1.13.3.
An error message is showing: Unable to find a medium containing a live file system.

...and I can't do much else.

I also encountered this same problem when trying to boot a Linux Mint LiveCD.

Okay, so here's something that might be the cause...these are all multi-boot DVDs provide by Linux Format. Maybe the multi-boot factor just isn't working properly on my system.

I think I'll try downloading my own Fedora LiveCD and burn my own ISO CD and see what happens with that.

[CSchwangler]

You might also try installing from a usb stick. The liveCD iso can be burnt to CD as well as installed to usb.

[Zanpactou]

An error message is showing: Unable to find a medium containing a live file system.
If it's not a bad burn, that error means that the disc drive is failing.

You might also try installing from a usb stick. The liveCD iso can be burnt to CD as well as installed to usb.
+1
Use unetbootin (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/) to make a bootable usb disc, if you have Fedora already installed anywhere unetbootin can be installed using yum.

Thanks,
Zanpactou

[Collywobbles]

Okay, I've burnt my own Fedora 13 LiveCD and it works perfectly (I'm using it now :))!

This must mean that my system simply doesn't like multi-boot CD's for some reason. I will let Linux Format know that I cannot use their multi-boot LiveCD's.

Thanks for all your help!

[vivyogesh]

i too faced tihis problem...

first i use fedora 13 ,then due some problem i formatted and installed ubuntu,now i am trying to install fedora13 from live cd which works on my friend laptop .it simply hang after showing
"PRESS <ENTER> TO START INSTALLATION PROCESS"

please help me but i chaged boot order as cd/dvd