Dell Latitude D531 boot problems

[thucar]

I see that the D531 has the following under compatibility list:

Latitude D531

* Boots Live and installs on hard drive perfectly (also dual boot -XP, BT).
* Does not boot from CD ( stops at Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M )

Well, I am getting the Floppy error which I tried to rectify by using the

bt acpi=off

cheat. Only to reach the

hda: lost interrupt

error.

This brings me to my question... how do I get it to boot Live and/or install on HDD?


EDIT: going on a hunch I disabled my optical drive in the BIOS and it passed the hda part with occasional errors. First about sata1 and then about usb 1-1 (telling me that the controller is using the wrong IRQ)

the last line I get and where it hangs now is:

ohci_hcd 0000:00:13.3: Unlink after no-IRQ? Controller is probably using the wrong IRQ.

[rrichmond]

Looks like I replied in the wrong area... Any way..Here's the correct spot...

Hi,

I was the poster who mentioned "- Does not boot from CD ( stops at Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M )" - It was a while ago..... :>

I found a solution.
1) Boot from the CD
2) Highlight "BT3 Text Mode Frame Buffer"
3) Press Tab
4) add -> nolapic
5) Press enter
6) Log in with root and toor
7) startx

Now that your in, you might notice that the wifi card is not detected..... Looking into this now. Might just be easier to use an external card though...

[rrichmond]

Hi,

I was the poster who mentioned "- Does not boot from CD ( stops at Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M )" - It was a while ago..... :>

I found a solution.
1) Boot from the CD
2) Highlight "BT3 Text Mode Frame Buffer"
3) Press Tab
4) add -> nolapic
5) Press enter
6) Log in with root and toor
7) startx

Now that your in, you might notice that the wifi card is not detected..... Looking into this now. Might just be easier to use an external card though...

[rrichmond]

Oh... And I got it working well now with a Linksys WUSB54GC Wireless USB Adapter.

[vector1]

well you're my new hero. i've been trying for -ages- to get BT3 to boot on my Inspiron 1721 due to the same symptoms. problem solved. all i can say is AAARRRGGHHH!!1@! and thank you.

[GreenNano]

Thanks for this. I'm gonna try it. I can do everything fine with BT2 but I've never been able to get BT3 to boot on my Dell Inspiron 1526.

One question though; according to the wiki, all cheat codes need to be prepended with 'bt' e.g. 'bt nolapic' so is that necessary here too?

Anyway, answered my own question...

This, (adding 'bt nolapic' as a cheat code) worked on my laptop (see above) woohoo! I could login to albeit the text version of BT3. startx didn't work "Fatal server error - no screens found" so I looked at the Slackware website about configuring X and tried xorgsetup after logging in. I did the step by step choosing hardware and it wrote me a lovely new xorg.conf file. Tried startx again and bang, here I am editing this post in BT3 (which I had almost given up on).

I am still typing the bt nolapic cheat code manually though. I tried to add it to the append part of the syslinux.cfg but somehow it gets ignored...