Hi,

I have two older Toshiba Satellites (a 2695 and a 2775) that I run AntiX 8.2 on with great success. Neither machine will boot up 8.5 rc1 or other 8.5's. I have burned the ISO slowly and on various drives. All of the CDs that I've burned boot fine on my Dell desktop.

I've tried booting in failsafe mode, but that's no good either.

Basic symptom is that when it tries to load initrd.gz everything just goes dead and the optical drive just stops spinning.

I'm disappointed because AntiX has been working great with these up to this point.

Have you tried the vesa option and/or vga=788? Also try noapic nolapic vga=771 or vga=788.

I googled and found that you might need edd=off as a boot cheat or this
acpi_osi="Linux"