I've downloaded the ISO twice, from http://hust.la/KnoppMyth/ and both times the MD5 sum verified. First time I burnt it at 32x, the max that the burner can do. The second at 20x, just to make sure I wasn't stressing it and causing write errors.

Both discs end up with this error when entering "tv<enter>" at the boot prompt.



What am I doing wrong?

I'm using "tv" because it's the only thing I've found that actually displays results on my monitor - a Dell LCD. If I just hit enter or try framebuffer, failsafe, or a specified resolution, I just get a black screen, and it seems to hang - but I can't see what errors it's reporting. I can only assume it's the same error.

Could it be hard drive related? I am using all scavenged hardware and the drive is old and could potentially have problems.

not at that point it's not harddrive related. It could be a bad cdrom drive, or bad ram, have you tried booting the cd on anything else. If you have another computer you can put in the cd and unless you say yes I understand data is going to get destroyed it won't touch the harddrive, but at least it would let you verify that you can get to the menus on another machine.

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Hi,
I find that a real good way to test hardware is to use the full knoppix live cd. You can download it from knoppix.org, important tip (I think) at the boot be sure to select a language for the keyboard mapping.

Type of cd material you burnt could also be a problem area as companies are not all the same.

Tv is good, 800x600 @ 60 htz. A few lcd monitors don't work at some of the higher v rates.

Mike

I was able to run memtest from the CD, and I will try to boot another computer from it tonight.

I tried 2 different media: HP and Memorex.

I suppose it could be a bad CD Rom, it's just an old DVD Rom I had lying around - and I can swap it out if need be, so I'll report back later tonight if any of these things fix my problem.

One of the "wonderful" things about CD or DVD burners and readers is that there is always a chance that they won't play nice together... Try burning on a different drive if you can.

Also - if you haven't re-downloaded the ISO image try that too. CRC's and MD5 hashes are probablistic error detection codes. Given a image size of >500,000,000 even a checksum that's good fo 9-9s will fail to detect half the potential errors (BTW - I don't remember how many 9s MD5 is good for, it might be far more than that...)

I've had similar kinds of problems with my setup. I'd use this dvd burner in my mythbox to burn an ISO in order to do an upgrade for knoppmyth. In my case, even the system burning the ISO couldn't read it.

But since it was a DVD burner, I tried burning the ISO onto DVD+R media and was able to upgrade just fine.

Since then I've chucked the drive and replaced it with a Plextor, because having a drive that can't always read CD-R media is very problematic.

Ya, my bet is the CD drive doesn't like the media, or CDRs in general.

-Aubrey

There are some good survey reviews out there on CD/DVD drives and their reliability and media compatibility. I don't remember where I saw them but they basically got a whole raft of different drives, stacks of different blank media and burned a bunch of each on each drive and then tried to read them back on the various drives... Probably http://www.anandtech.com/ Which seems to do these either 2-3 times a year... There was a note in one of the recent reviews about media that seemed to burn without errors on certain drives but didn't want to read back correctly later... Also comments that a firmware upgrade may make all the difference in the world...

It took me a while to get more time to work on this, but I have.

Today I swapped the DVD rom out and a newish Lite-On CDRW in. I also swapped the RAM out (1x512) and other RAM in (2x256). This should provide for a *small* performance gain (nforce2 mobo), and was necessary in order to get my main machine back up to it's full 1GB of RAM - since I bought the other half gig for it today.

Unfortunately, none of this solved my problem. I'm still exactly where I was earlier.

Are we sure it's not a hard drive problem? I have a couple spares I could toss in just to verify - and I probably will - because that's pretty much the only other hardware I can change for free, and it couldn't hurt to try it.

If this still doesn't work - what in the heck can I do? I've downloaded the ISO twice (albeit, from the same computer and internet connection) and burned it twice (from the same burner - but on different types of media each time). I suppose if swapping the disk drive doesn't do the trick I'll have my dad download, verify, and burn it for me and try once again.

If a third download, on a 2nd computer, and 2nd burner, with a third media manufacturer doesn't work, I don't know WHAT the heck I'm going to do.

I'd really like to get this working in the next few days. It'd be a nice coming-home present for my fiance who's currently taking some little girls camping for her work (social worker).

It'd also be nice to give comcast the ole F-U!

Once I had to burn a KnoppMyth ISO on one of my CD-RW burners, then install the same burner into the system I was installing onto, then boot and install, then after all was working, pull the CD-RW and put in the DVD-ROM that was going there. It was the only way I could get it to boot.

turns out it was either a bad burn or a bad download.

I used a copy burned from another computer/download and it installed!

Now my next issue is figuring out how/where to get an id & password to download xmltv listings.

and also - when I select the option to watch live tv, all I get is a blank screen. If I hit ctrl+tab, I get what looks like an infinite loop of almost a whole screen's worth of commands that sort of resemble what happens if I just type "mythtv" into a terminal:

http://img357.imageshack.us/img357/704/img00122ux.jpg

if you are in the US that's covered in the install documentation.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets