Acer Aspire 5570z Laptop Not Booting with Live CDs

Hello, all.

I posted in the comp.os.linux.help newsgroup regarding my problems
getting any linux distro to boot on my friend's laptop. That group is not
nearly as populated as this one and it does seem to be a hardware issue,
so I though someone here could help me. A repeat of my original post
follows. Please note since then I also tried Puppy Linux 4.1 but to no
avail.



My friend has an Acer Aspire 5570z laptop. It was running Vista, in a
way. (I did not consider it "running" Vista until we replaced the 512
megabyte RAM chip with a 1 gigabyte module.) Then one day it got very
slow and then got to the point where it just would not boot the OS.


First thing we are doing is trying to rescue some files off of the
drive. Mostly photos. Second thing is my friend would like to give Linux
a go. So it is most important to rescue the files, but I would very much
like to help her get Linux running on the machine.


I have tried many Live CDs. Typically they boot into a splash screen and
allow me to select an option from a menu. After making my selection, the
CD makes it way along and then freezes. A few distros booted up to a
point where they would show icons for each part of the system loaded and
freeze on the second or third item. Two of them would boot into a desktop
environment and then freeze up when any application was run or any window
opened.


The freezing is almost always accompanied by a fuzzy screen with rows of
lines across them. The lines alternate between solid and dotted. The
number, height, colour and spacing of the rows varies by quite a bit.


System Rescue CD can boot into the command line. I am currently looking
trying to use this to FTP or rsync (new territory for me, but lots of
documentation on rsync in available) the files to another computer.
System Rescue CD and Knoppix will boot into a desktop, but freeze and
show the weird visual I described above on top of the desktop if an
application or window is opened.

The system is an Acer Aspire 5570z with the following specs claimed by
the sticker on the case:

Intel T2060 CPU
14.1" WXGA LCD Screen
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 chip (during the attempt boot of one
distro it said it was 945 chip)
160 GB hard drive
DVD dual layer burner
802.11g wifi network adaptor

It also has a wired ethernet port.

I tried the Live CDs of the following distrubutions

Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) 8.04
Mepis 7.0
Antix 6.5
Mandriva One 2009
PCLinuxOS 2007
minime 2008
Knoppix 5.1
Vector Linux 5.9
Puppy Linux 3.1
Mint Linux v 5
System Rescue CD 1.1.0


I was able to fully boot the non-Linux free OS Syllable. It booted, but
does not have much in the way of applications for it yet, so there did
not seem to be anything that would help me. It would mount, but not write
to my USB memory stick. It would not identify the network adaptor either.


The world wide web has a billion or so page about getting the wireless
networking abilities of this laptop working, and a huge number of pages
about setting the resolution and even many on using a modem with the
machine, but none describing my problem.

So it must be possible to use a GNU/Linux operating system on this
machine, but I have yet to be able to even boot into a Linux CD even
after trying 10 distros using many different boot options on each one.


I do not think I could have possibly tried every option, but I did boot
with many different "VGA=xxx" options and power management off options as
well.

It would be so much easier to do the backups with a full blown, GUI
included, OS running (and I have yet to establish that for sure I can
make the CLI of System Rescue CD solve my backup issue although I am
confident it will) and regardless I would like to be able to get my
friend enjoying the benefits of Linux.

So if anyone can provide me with some advice on the matter it would be
most appreciated. A distro known to boot up and install on this machine,
boot options that make one of the ones I tried work, etc, would be
especially helpful.

Thanks.

John McKenzie <davros@accesscable.net> wrote:[color=blue]
> we replaced the 512 megabyte RAM chip with a 1 gigabyte module.[/color]

Do you still have the old replaced 512 MB memory module? If so, you could
try to revert to the old memory and see if the laptop works better.
[color=blue]
> The freezing is almost always accompanied by a fuzzy screen with rows of
> lines across them. The lines alternate between solid and dotted. The
> number, height, colour and spacing of the rows varies by quite a bit.[/color]

This could be because of broken graphics card, broken motherboard, broken
memory or a heat problem. I suppose that the laptop has at least one fan?
Does the fan seem to be working?

Another simple test is to run memtestx86.

regards Henrik
--
The address in the header is only to prevent spam. My real address is:
hc3(at)poolhem.se Examples of addresses which go to spammers:
root@localhost postmaster@localhost

Henrik;

Thanks for responding to my posting.

I ran memtest when I first got the machine, but only for a few minutes
as I was in a hurry. After doing it again for a much longer time (I know
people who run it for hours to be sure when builing a new system) it
encountered a problem. Took the RAM to the store where it was purchased
and they gave me a new module to test it with in the store. Did so.
Everything was fine. Took home new module. Everything fine since then,
hardware wise.

Everything was run of the mill things I needed to fix in software, and
addiationally I have Ubuntu 8.04 running on the machine now. Wireless is
acting a little weird, but it is there.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond to my post.

John McKenzie <davros@accesscable.net> wrote in
news:10fLk.2939$%%2.1714@edtnps82:
[color=blue]
>
> Everything was run of the mill things I needed to fix in software,
> and
> addiationally I have Ubuntu 8.04 running on the machine now.[/color]

FWIW....there is a specific Ubuntu newsgroup you might be interested in:

alt.os.linux.ubuntu

[color=blue]
> Wireless is
> acting a little weird, but it is there.
>[/color]


The following url might be of use:

[url]http://ubuntufor5570z.blogspot.com/[/url]

<quote on>

.........the Atheros AR5007EG wireless adapter was again not working
correctly. In my search for a fix, I discovered it's now possible to use
the adapter without ndiswrapper. Thanks to Tom-X on Ubuntu forums, we
have excellent instructions on getting it working, which I am reprinting
here.

<quote off>