Boot stuck after discovering USB devices

Question

I'm trying to boot Ubuntu 11.10 from a LiveCD on a newly built PC. The LiveCD is confirmed to work fine on a macbook pro.

The boot process stops at a blinking cursor screen with grey text. It responds to keyboard presses, but they are just entered onto the screen an have no effect. Unplugging and replugging USB devices in will cause it to display some status updates like "USB device 4 unplugged.." Waiting several hours has no effect. The CD drive is not spinning.

Any ideas?

Motherboard: ASUS P8Z68-V/GEN3
Processor: Intel Core i5 2500
Graphics: Nvidia GTX 570.

Answer 1

I ran into the same issue with Xubuntu 11.10 AMD64, Core I7 2600 and Nvidia GTX 560 Ti. Setting the "acpi=off" boot option allowed the boot to complete. I then installed to hard disk, and made sure to update the kernel to the latest available. It was able to boot off the hard disk without any special boot options.