[sf-lug] Why PcLinuxOS and Ubuntu failed to work on Emmanuel's laptop

[Kristian Erik Hermansen]

I thought everyone would enjoy this story.  Christian, Asheesh, and I
were trying to get Emmanuel set up with his broken Windows laptop.
Now, Christian had installed PcLinuxOS on Saturday at the event and I
had noticed some weirdness.  Emmanuel resurfaced today at the SFLUG
meeting to show us that he was having issues.  After looking it over,
we decided to give Ubuntu a shot.  The Live CD appeared to be
corrupted, but it was a pressed disc!  So we tried another disc, and
that also failed!  We then tried to reinstall PCLinuxOS, but that also
failed!  Then we tried booting the Ubuntu CD and manually copying over
data from another installation and that also failed (kernel panic)!

Lesson learned?  Always memtest86+ the machine before going anywhere.
There was bad RAM in the laptop :-)  So, Emmanuel needs to go get some
new RAM, or work around it using the mem kernel option, but that was
resulting in other issues we shouldn't even get into on this list :-P
-- 
Kristian Erik Hermansen
"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."