Compaq 1200z laptop - MDK 9.1 installation freezes

**screen** · April 23rd, 2003, 09:01 AM

I'm annoyed with this freezing problem of Mandrake 9.1 during installation.

I have a Compaq 1200z laptop with 900MHz mobile Athlon 4 processor, 320MB RAM, 30G.

When I boot with the Mandrake installation cd, the installer stops while detecting the devices. I saw this happening earlier when the USB support was enabled. I looked for options to disable the USB support in the BIOS. The laptop BIOS was almost empty. No configuration settings except for the date, time, and boot sequence. I cannot disable or enable any of the devices (so typical of compaq systems).

Does anyone have experience of installing linux on compaq laptops? Are there any tricks for linux installation on compaq laptops? If no, how do I disable USB device detection/support during installation?

-Screen

**sixf00t4** · April 23rd, 2003, 02:44 PM

did you verify the downloads? mdsum5? it is possible you just have a corrupt cd. yo dont have anything plugged into the usb do you? did you try that?

**screen** · April 23rd, 2003, 05:16 PM

Originally posted by sixf00t4
did you verify the downloads? mdsum5? it is possible you just have a corrupt cd. yo dont have anything plugged into the usb do you? did you try that?

I've installed linux on my desktop using the same CD set (thanks to Crouse). I had a similar problem on my desktop ( a Dell machine) where the installation stops while detecting the devices. However, the installation (on the desktop) went through without any problems after I disconnected all USB devices.

On this laptop, I did not connect any USB devices, and there is no option in BIOS to disable the devices.

The person from whom I bought the laptop told me that he had installed Redhat 7.2 on this laptop. I asked him the same question, and few minutes back, in his email, he suggested that I should pass "nousb pci=off" options to the kernel at the beginning of the installation (it worked for him). I'll try that when I resume the installation process.

-Screen

**screen** · April 25th, 2003, 12:14 PM

Finally got MDK 9.1 working. There were several postings on mandrakeclub forums about problems with MDK9.1 and Redhat 8.x on several computers. Most of them were solved by passing the following options to the linux kernel during the installation
"nousb noauto noapic nomce acpi=off". The installation went on smoothly. Now I have a dual boot Win2k, and linux.

-Screen