[Discuss] Post issue with bootable linux

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 5/1/2018 11:53 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> I have a guy with an older system
> Core2 duo CPU
> 4GB ddr2 scramble
> 
> Dell motherboard
> The problem is when I boot with a known good bootable Linux usb
> Ubuntu, Fedora the system fails to post.
> 1. Dell logo comes up
> 2. Press F12 (boot) or F2 (setup) the light flashes on the usb and the
> system is otherwise frozen.
> 3. Neither the setup nor boot menu come up
> 
> However, when I use a bootable gparted USB it comes up fine. When I go to
> the boot menu and select the usb, it boots.
> 

I once had a system that had a strange incompatibility with most
kernels, but there was a command line option (maybe an iommu related
one?) that let me boot all kernels.  Figured it out by checking the
motherboard/chipsets and found a known issue with kernels at the time.

If I had to guess, I'd say gparted uses a kernel that isn't set up to
probe anything beyond the necessities (keyboard, disks, mouse and
display), where the end-user distros like Ubuntu and Fedora have a
kernel that is set up to probe for everything that might be available,
and you're hitting some chipset-specific issue.

Thanks,
Matt