[amerrykan]

Hi guys, I'm really not new to dealing with ISOs so it's a bit of a shock that I cannot get the 9.04.1 Live ISO to do anything on my diskless Zotac ION N330.

What I've tried:

Writing the ISO to three different USB thumb drives (using UNetBootin).
Writing the ISO to one SD card (again, using UNetBootin), and booting it from a USB SD reader.
Writing the ISO to a CDROM and booting to it on my main desktop.
Downloading the ISO to my Ubuntu 9.04 laptop and using the provided scripts to write an "installed" Live platform to a USB thumb drive.

What usually happens:

If no bootable partition is found, I am given a warning that says so, so I know the system is finding something..

Usually, GRUB fails to boot. If GRUB does boot, I can choose an option from the boot menu, get the XBMC throbbing usplash. usplash disappears and is replaced with a blinking cursor in the top left corner. I can toggle through terminals with Ctrl+Alt+1-6, and terminal 1 responds to my keystrokes, but there's no prompt to interact with. I'm not sure how to get any more information from the system while it's in this state.

I figured my new Zotac board was going bonkers, or maybe it was freaking out because it couldn't find a HDD or something, but then I burned the CD and reproduced the behavior on both my Core2Duo desktop and my MSI Wind U100 netbook. Just to make completely sure that my Zotac build was sane, I did full install of Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop. No issues.

Using the Install from ISO scripts provided in the .ZIP, I wrote an installation to a USB drive. Upon boot, this goes directly to a blinking cursor.

I tried so many different ways, I assumed the ISO was corrupted or something. I just downloaded the ISO once more and tried again. I get the same exact behavior on my new Zotac HTPC, my desktop and my netbook, all completely different platforms.

Looking at the forums, I see the image has worked for other people. Am I doing something wrong, or is SourceForge replicating a corrupted image across the mirrors?

Help!

[Maxim]

or is SourceForge replicating a corrupted image across the mirrors?

This is unlikely since it's distributed in a ZIP file and when it's extracted it gets CRC checked. It's still possible though.

What might be helpful would be to get the /var/log/Xorg.log off the system after it boots up to the blinking cursor. Most likely X is taking a poop and the log might say what's going on.

[amerrykan]

This is unlikely since it's distributed in a ZIP file and when it's extracted it gets CRC checked. It's still possible though.

What might be helpful would be to get the /var/log/Xorg.log off the system after it boots up to the blinking cursor. Most likely X is taking a poop and the log might say what's going on.

Would SSH be running at this point?

I'll take another peek at it when I get home, but I have no idea how I could drop out to a shell once it hits this state.

[amerrykan]

I can't SSH in, networking doesn't appear to be started (my DHCP server shows no new leases).

I couldn't figure out how to mount the file system on the XBMC Live installation on the USB thumb drive.

How should I proceed?

[campbeln]

I've got the same issue (though GRUB hasn't failed for me), any ideas anyone?

[campbeln]

Ok, I fixed this...

When choosing any entry from the Grub menu, press TAB which will show you the command that is to be run. I then removed "cd quiet splash" and replaced it with "usb", this allows you to see what is happening and to have the thumb drive be seen rather then xbmc looking for a CD.

I was able to install from my thumb after making this change!

Hope this helps!

Cn