Hanging during startup.

Apologies if similar has been asked previously. I did try searching, but didn't spot anything that seemed to cover the problem I'm having.

Stepdaughter has one of these puppies, and it hasn't been doing too badly (despite her best efforts... children these days). Anyhoo, she was complaining that recently it was starting to slow down a bit. No big deal thought I , as computers are prone to doing exactly that. Then I get a text message from her that "My laptop isn't working!". Not very helpful, so I finally got a chance to have a look at it, and now I'm stumped.

Press the power button, and it brings up the first screen (with the options to enter setup etc) then moves onto the blue screen with the AspireOne logo at the bottom. At this point, it stops loading anything. Pressing ESC brings up the following info on screen:-

TuxOnIce: No attempt was made to resume from any image that might exist.
pciehp: Device 0000:02:00.0 already exists at 2:0, cannot hot-add
pciehp: Cannot add device 0x2:0
pciehp: Device 0000:03:00.0 already exists at 3:0, cannot hot-add
pciehp: Cannot add device 0x3:0
pciehp: Device 0000:04:00.0 already exists at 4:0, cannot hot-add
pciehp: Cannot add device 0x4:0
sdhci:slot0: Unknown controller version (1). You may experience problems.

Now I know not a whole heck about Linux (having been stuck with M$ since back in the days of DOS, and only once dabbled with Ubuntu), but I'm not sure if this is an OS problem (the original Linpus, with regular updates) or more likely, a hardware problem. The system has an 8GB expansion card fitted, but other than that, is absolutely standard. I'm thinking it might have been dropped or suchlike, but she say no. I'm now getting the typical teenager moan of "But all my work is on there, and I need it for college, DO SOMETHING", to which my replies of "Why haven't you been saving you stuff to pen drives like I told you to do ages ago?" merely gets me a growl and a "it's not fair". If someone could give me some suggestions, (other than tell her where to go ) that'd be great.

 

Create a bootable SD Card, usb stick or CD(if you have a usb CD drive). These will boot into ram and allow you to inspect all your internal/external drives. You confused me calling the netbook a puppy as the easist Linux distro to do this with is from puppy.com but if you have experience of another distro then it probably has similar functions.

Once you are up and running back up everything before exploring or writing to the internal storage card. These cards do wear out, especially if they get too hot from sustained write operations. Just use the file manager to drag all data to external storage. This is slower than proprietary backup software but less likely to aggrevate a card problem. The run chkdsk to see where the fault is.

We have covered this topic on other posts in the past few days.