[ale] Linux won't boot

[Cornelis van Dijk]

Hello alers,

This is a continuation of the saga from two weeks ago when I had a
dead harddrive. I put in a new one, which got a clean bill of health
from several diagnostics. Even so,  I could not get suse  11.2 or even
XP to boot.  In desperation I went to HL computer on West Park Place
here near Mountain Park. I don't know what they did, but they got XP
in there and booting (they wont deal with Linux they said). According
to them the BIOS was blocked, whatever that means ( I did not speak to
the guy who did the actual work). When asked, they said that they did
not reflash the BIOS.

Starting from there I tried to put suse 11.2 in there. The thing (HP
Pavilion laptop) seems to go through the motions for 45 minutes, then
advertises a reboot and dies! Tried again and now it comes up but does
not recognize my name or password.  Tried a repair session to end up
with an enormous amount of error messages.

Faulty installation media? But I had used these same disks several
times on regular PC's without a problem, and why would my XP
installation disk have the same problem. (Note that the HL guys had
their own XP installation disk).

I am writing this from a regular PC which has suse 11.2 from the same
installation disk!

The  frustrating thing is that the installation seems to go smoothly
up the point where the system goes into reboot for the finishing
touches. Then a black screen forever, no disk activity or anything
else, crl-alt-del does nothing. Only a hard reboot brings the system
back up (XP will then boot, the last time I tried)

I am stumped. This very same laptop had both XP and suse 8.2 in it for years.
I would be much obliged for useful comments and suggestions.
Thanks in advance,

Cor van Dijk