Sabayon Linux and an HP Laptop

Submitted by PurpleAlien on Sat, 11/05/2011 - 07:24

Tags: Computer, Linux

As a long time Linux user, and Gentoo in particular, I wanted to try a Gentoo derivative called Sabayon on my new used HP 6730b.

Tux Gentoo

I downloaded the latest ISO, burned it to a DVD and plugged it into the laptop to boot the installer. The problem that occured then was that the system froze at the bios screen and the capslock and numlock key flashed in a repetitive 5 flashes - pause - 5 flashes, the DVD was spinning at full speed, the fan kicked in and... nothing.

Looking into that, I found that those 5 flashing leds indicate a general system board failure. Without the DVD inserted however, it booted fine. Something crashing the bios?

The solution to this problem is not exactly logical:

- Make sure the CD gets the highest boot priority in the BIOS
- Boot the laptop without DVD inserted
- Interrupt the boot sequence at the bios by pressing the escape key
- Insert the DVD
- Wait a little
- Continue normal boot process

I know... weird, but at least now I have a nice and shiny new Sabayon installation.

Comments

Thank God for this

Submitted by iforce2d on Sun, 11/13/2011 - 14:59.

I was in the same situation, and this worked for me too. Unfortunately it only seems to work for optical disk boot, not USB stick boot.

To make things more confusing, I had just installed Windows XP without needing to do this. After XP was installed I found I could still insert the XP CD and boot off it without any trouble at all, but anything else I tried (Ubuntu, Fedora, iAtkos, GParted) would not work. This was leading me to believe that the problem was with HP's security features on my 8530w, since they seem to be quite strongly tied into the Windows OS. Also, I just got the laptop yesterday and was not familiar with the icons for caps lock and numlock printed on it, and I thought the locks were indicating something to do with security... yeah kick me. So I was dicking around with the BIOS settings for half a day until I got here...

Actually I could have sworn I had actually tried your method already, but maybe that was with the USB stick. Anyway, seeing this made me try again. Thanks!

Cool

Submitted by PurpleAlien on Mon, 11/14/2011 - 04:28.

Hi.

I was hoping this would be useful to someone! Thanks for taking the time to let me know.

Johan.