Notebook HP Compaq 6820s freezes

[Sagittarius]

On a HP Compaq 6820s notebook both versions of Porteus 2.0 (XFCE and standard) freeze after:

"live system is ready now - starting Porteus
INIT: version 2.88 booting
triggering udev events: /sbin/udevadm trigger --action=add

(freezes)

I've tried XFCE on a live cd and the standard version installed on a flash drive.

Notebook HP Compaq 6820s specs:

CPU
Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo T5470 @ 1.60GHz 52 °C
Merom 65nm Technology
RAM
1,00GB Single-Channel DDR2 (5-5-5-15)
Motherboard
Hewlett-Packard 30D7 (U10) 57 °C
Graphics
Monitor PnP genérico (1440x900@60Hz)
128MB ATI video (HP)
Hard Drives
149GB TOSHIBA MK1637GSX (SATA) 40 °C
Optical Drives
MATSHITA DVD-RAM UJ-861H ATA Device
Audio
SoundMAX Integrated Digital HD Audio

That's a shame as Porteus works well on two old boxes. I guess the HP notebook isn't compatible? It has a very slow Vista preinstalled

[Ahau]

Hi Sagittarius,

How long did you let it sit after it started to hang? I had a similar hang on udev a while back (not present on that machine anymore in Porteus 2.0 though), as described here: http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=918

It would hang for 2 minutes, then continue moving forward. If you didn't wait that long, please try again and wait at least a few minutes to see if it will pick back up and continue on; in either case, try with saved changes on so that you can grab your dmesg output on a working machine and look for errors. Since it's udev that's hanging, it's probably a hardware issue and it should show something in dmesg.

[Sagittarius]

Thanks for the answer Ahau, I waited for over 5 minutes and nothing happened. I'm not sure how I can try with saved changes as there's no save.dat on the usb since I can't boot the usb from my other 2 old boxes, even with plop boot manager. Oh well, this is another family member's computer so I think that's it!

[Ahau]

hmm...

A couple things you could try if you have the time and desire --

install an older version of porteus on the flash drive and see if that would boot, and if so, use that to create a save.dat, or burn another linux distro CD and boot from that. Would a Porteus CD boot on one of the old computers that won't boot from usb?

[fanthom]

another idea is to boot to text mode with 'nohotplug' cheatcode (skips udev) and then modprobe kernel modules manually till you find the troubling one.
if you find it and if it wont be a driver which is critically needed for your PC then you could blacklist it.

there is a high chance that it's a drm driver causing problems so you could also use proprietary GPU drivers (amd-catalyst, nVidia) if they match your hardware.

[Sagittarius]

Thanks very much for all the ideas guys.

As it's not my computer to fiddle with for too long right now (though I might end up with it in the end as I get the unwanted "hand-me-downs"), I surrendered to the temptation and went over to your competition. I got the same result from Slax, but got a hit with Slacko. So at the moment we have a working Linux alternative!