Installation Problem

[cecleary]

I have been watching ROS for over a year and I am pleased with the development. I decided to try both a LiveCD and a full install on a test pc. I cannot get either to work. They just freeze upon loading.
Hardware:
Intel Atom D945GCLF2D
1 GB DDR 2 Crucial
Intel onboard Graphics
Realtek Sound and Ethernet
Crucial 64 GB SSD

Any suggestions?

Thank you.

[dizt3mp3r]

Yes. Read the installation instructions in my signature below.

Install on virtual hardware and lower your expectations. It would be nice if it worked on your specific mix of hardware but unlikely at this time. I

[middings]

I decided to try both a LiveCD and a full install on a test pc.

I see that you provided an outline of your test PC's equipment in your post. That is good. What is the make and model of your test PC? If your test PC is a so-called white box PC, please identify the make and model of its motherboard. A link to the manufacturer's web page with the specifications of your exact make and model is also helpful, if this is available.

I cannot get either to work. They just freeze upon loading.

Please describe the stage of the loading process at which the freeze occurs. A picture of the screen showing what it looks like at the point your computer freezes is helpful. If possible, take a picture of the screen with a digital camera (the one in a cell phone will do). The ReactOS web site does not directly accept pictures in posts, however there is a workaround. Put the picture on one of the web sites that host pictures for free, then include the web link (URL) to your picture in your post. If the image is not huge, you could surround the URL with the Img tag like this [img]http://image_url[/img] and the image will appear in your post.

Any suggestions? Thank you.

From the list of hardware components in your PC that you provided in your post, I can see that your PC's design is newer than the typical PC which was shipped by its manufacturer with Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 pre-installed. The best PCs to experiment with ReactOS at this time are ones originally designed and shipped with those operating systems.

Does your PC use any USB-interfaced devices? PCs with Intel Atom processors often rely on USB devices to operate. Even a USB mouse or keyboard device can cause problems for ReactOS at this time. Modern laptops almost always use USB interfaces with their internal keyboards and touchpads in order to reduce the number of internal interconnecting wires. USB devices often cause ReactOS to freeze or hang during installation because the ReactOS USB stack is incomplete at this time. The ReactOS development team is aware of this shortcoming and developers (devs) are working to resolve it. Implementing all the USB resources that Microsoft Windows provides is a challenge. The most likely cause of your PC's freeze during installation is the not-yet-implemented parts of ReactOS's USB stack.

If your test PC has an RS-232 serial port and you have a second PC also equipped with a RS-232 port able to act as a debugger host, then you could obtain a debug log or a backtrace. The RS-232 ports of the test (target) PC and host PC are connected with a null-modem cable. (A normal RS-232 cable will not do.) The ReactOS Wiki pages Debugging (very technical and may be a bit out of date) and A layman's guide by user 'oldman' (requires less technical knowledge, very practical instructions) are helpful.

A debug log or backtrace reveals the internal state of the PC and the code it was executing at the time of the freeze. (Your PC's design may be too modern to have such a port. A USB-to-RS-232 adapter will not do.) If your test PC does not have such a port, the debug information can be written to the screen then captured in a photograph or written to your test PC's disk. The drawback to these methods is that if the PC freezes while running ReactOS, then the user might not be able to use the PC's keyboard to break into the ReactOS debugger in order to use its backtrace (bt) command. An increasingly popular workaround is to install virtualization software on your test PC and run ReactOS inside a virtual machine hosted on your test PC.