[nzlug] Debian live distros not booting

[Dirk Pilat]

Hi all,

I feel incredibly stupid asking this, but three of my favourite distros  
are not booting from my current gaming rack:

It's a Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939 with a nforce3 chipset. It has a gig of ram,  
SATA HD, DVD-writer and a IDE HD. (Interestingly, due to some Kernel  
problem, the proprietary nvidia driver refuses to acknowledge the presence  
of the 6800GT in the AGP slot. It's complicated).

Anyway, both Knoppix, Dyne:bolic and DSL refuse to boot off the sata  
optical drive (and dsl off USB stick): after doing a normal startup  
routine they drop into a shell, commenting that it can't find the drive it  
just booted off.

Funnily, Ubuntu and Suse don't have this problem.

Ideas?

Dirk