On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 23:18 +0100, Mark and Jenny Myatt wrote:

Hi Wayne -thanks (and also to Nick Daniels)

I could not get into the Bios settings at all. Not by f2,f8;f10. After much trial and error I discovered the problem was caused by my Labtec keyboard, even though the bios had legacy enabled. So I changed it for an old spare one. This enabled me to get into my bios and change the sequence so that I can now boot up from a DVD/CD as necessary. I am now trying out a number of live distros but quit a few stall after being partly loaded but I have tried ones that do work. SimplyMepis and Knoppix.

Try playing with some of the boot time options with the others, sometimes it is possible to bring up a help screen on the boot prompt that will guide you with these. Look in particular at options to disable acpi and apic.

Just a thought. I run windows 2000 Prof and the NFTS system. I need to have a dual booting system. Reports in the press seem to indicate this can cause a problem with linux software. Is this correct and if so is it possible for the NFTS to be converted back to fat32?

Writing to NTFS is not considered a stable feature in the kernel, not because it doesn't work but because it was a product of reverse engineering the NTFS filesystem.

The latest version of Ubuntu (and I think knoppix) both support writing to NTFS volumes..some other distributions will support read only.

Conversion back to fat32 is possible with 3rd party tools but not recommended, mainly because it is possible to have conditions in an NTFS filesystem that are not valid in fat32 (files over fat's file size limit, maximum path length etc etc)

With either the conversion or writing to NTFS from Ubuntu I would recommend you take a backup of any important data first.