by dcorleone » Sat Feb 02, 2008 8:29 am
You didn't try to use some odd file-system did you? I'm not sure, but I don't THINK you can boot from an ext4 or reiser4 partition. You used just regular ext3 volumes?
I'm not a linux expert, I just know enough to get in trouble, so I'm just goin' on generic tech-support instincts here, but it sounds like a driver issue. Laptops are often quirky. The live disc would run fine cuz it's running off a regular ATAPI CD/DVD drive and runs in RAM. That's why you can run the live-disc. I'd suspect that it can install because some module-level driver gets run during the live-disc bootup so you can access your drives once linux is up and running, but you can't access 'em to boot from cuz that's at a stage of the process before that part gets loaded.
Again, I'm just talkin' out my ass here, but if it was me, I'd do some research on the laptop. Find out what kinda chipset it uses, what kinda drives, etc, then see if I could find any info about potential hardware conflicts. It might not turn anything up, but it'd be a good place to start looking.
Good luck.