by bobw » Sep 18th, '14, 00:27
I, too, cannot get MGA4.1_64-bit to boot on my HP DV5T. I downloaded the iso, burned it with K3B, all MD5 and SHA1 checksums were correct, and K3B verified the data - with one caveat. At the verify pass, I was prompted to put in a disk?!. It seems that re-reading the DVD takes FOREVER for the system to recognize it. I let it sit for about 30 seconds and kept hitting the LOAD button. It finally saw the drive and performed the verify. This behavior is EXACTLY what I see when I try to boot the DVD. The CDROM is not ready or is taking too much time doing whatever, and then grub appears and I proceed to boot into Mageia. Finally, after logging into KDE, the notifier pops up showing me that there is a disk in the CDROM - finally!
This whole incident was prompted by the fact that I had an entry in fstab that was deleted (/dev/sdb1) and MCC did not remove it from fstab. Upon reboot, systemd had issues trying to mount sdb1, and instead of allowing me to hit CTRL-D or enter in the root password (to mnt the partitions and remove the offending line in fstab), it just skipped over that part and went on to search for more hardware!!!!???? Hooray for systemd!!!! Locked out! So my solution was to reboot into rescue mode with MGA4.1 DVD. No luck!!! Dead in the water!!! Nada!!!! The DVD was not readable by the system.
Long story short - I rebooted with MGA3 and performed the rescue.
In my opinion, both DVD booting and use of systemd in Mageia are still too buggy for everyday use. I have had far too many times where I could not perform a shutdown from KDE using the logout/shutdown/restart buttons. Nothing happens. After opening konsole and typing 'systemctl poweroff' am I able to get the machine to respond. Coupled with the fact that I can't drop into a shell if bootup hangs....well you can understand why my opinion is such.
My feeling is that Mageia should give the user a CHOICE to use either sysvinit or systemd. My machine was FAR more stable using the former. I'm not happy about being forced to use something that is so buggy that I'm forever having to sort out these issues instead of getting work done on my computer!!!