Got exactly the same issue on a rather oldish Sony Vaio PCG-Z600 TEK. I found the following workaround and successfully installed Linux Mint 8 LXDE Community Edition (which ist based on Ubuntu Karmic, so I guess this also applies there):
The Laptop has got a pcmcia CD-ROM it can boot from, but after having chosen the option to start the live CD in the GRUB menu, it hangs after a couple of seconds printing the message "/init: line 1: can't open /dev/sdb: No medium found" (initramfs) Unable to find a medium containing a live file system I then created a bootable USB Pen-Drive using the same Mint 8 LXDE iso I burnt to the CD before. I used Ubuntu's usb-creator application to do that. I then opened the BIOS setup of my vaio just to find out that it can't boot from usb-drives. I tried nonetheless, but it didn't work. Thinking about the line "Unable to find a medium containing a live file system", I thought: Hey, if he (the laptop, mine is male) can't *find* one, at least he's *searching*, right? So I popped in the usb drive again, rebooted from the CD and waited to see if he would find the "live file system" on the usb drive. And, ta-dah, he did! Booted up the live system just fine and performed the hd-install from there. Needless to say, it was incredibly slow (Pentium 3...@700mhz and 512 MB RAM), but it worked! Now that it runs off the hd it's speedy for every day surfing / mailing etc. Not a solution, but a very easy workaround. Hope this helps. Cheers, Phil -- Karmic Koala Beta does not install on Sony Vaio https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/454158 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs