Sorry friends, If someone did indeed go through that long post I sent in last night, they would find that I left out the most critical bit.
Here it is. When booting form the hardrive or through the xubuntu live cd in the verbose option, the cursor would stop at these lines and refuse to proceed any further: ....... io scheduler noop registered io scheduler aniticipatory registered io scheduler deadline registered io scheduler cfq registered (default) PCI: VIA PCI bridge detected. Disabling DAC pci 0000:00:10:4: EHCI: unrecognised capability 00 [blinking cursor...} Regards, Biswajit D Baruah aka orthodoc -- ubuntu-in mailing list ubuntu-in@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-in