Helix liveCD stops Dells from booting

[Monkeywrench]

This is a rather embarassing episode I just experienced today.

My school's computer lab is primarily Dells with a few Macs. They're pretty "high-end" systems. 2.26 P4 procs, 512 RAM, like that. Anyway, since I'm a paranoiac, and since Windows 2000 pisses me off, I've started bringing my Helix LiveCD in and booting to that (http://www.e-fense.com/helix) . Helix is a specialized version of Knoppix to basically not touch the host system and "be forensically sound." In other words, no automounting hard drives on boot.

Anyway, all is good and well. After I finish doing what I do, I shutdown and leave. I don't bother turning the computer back on, since I'm an idealistic environmentalist who thinks that the downtime will make a difference in the world. So today, one of the computer lab people sees me working with it, and tells me that when I left yesterday, the computer I was working on wouldn't boot. When I shutdown the computer I was working on, sure enough, the computer refused to boot. By "refuse to boot", I mean you turn the computer on, and the screen is blank. The power LED blinks green, which I believe means there's no video signal going to it.

Powering off, powering on, still wouldn't work. Unplugging the power cord, plugging it back it, still wouldn't work. After 5 or so reboots, and removing the power cord twice, it boots.

Now I'm confused. What the hell happened? Needless to say, this was pretty humiliating. I didn't mount the hard drive, and all I did on the computer was use Firefox, fluxbox, and ssh to my home computer. I mounted a USB key drive to copy my ssh private key, but that's it. The kernel version was 2.6.7.

Any ideas? Apparently, the issue is the BIOS, as there is NO visual at all on boot. I suppose unplugging the computer fixes it by resetting the BIOS (but doesn't the BIOS work off the CMOS battery?). What. the. hell.

At this point, I'm blaming Dell. Helix works beautifully on my 3-year-old Sony Vaio, as well as the computer I've built myself. I can't think of any other explanations, but Dell seems like the easiest way to go.

Thanks for any feedback. This was pretty saddening, since the guy seemed pretty pissed at me for it, and I don't think I'll be able to use a Live CD anymore (so I won't even be able to see if it was just Helix, or booting from CDs in general)
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[Monkeywrench]

Yay! Bump!
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