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I've been using Linux for 14 years, and this is the first time in a long time I've needed help.

I have about a dozen computers all running Mint. The exception is my wife's ASUS N70S laptop. Last year when I left Mandriva in favor of Mint, I couldn't get her laptop to boot the Mint live CD, so I gave her OpenSuse 12.1 instead.

A few days ago after I did a routine update, the system wouldn't run X11, except in failsafe. I assumed it had upgraded the kernel, since it asked for a reboot, so I reinstalled the NVidia driver. This didn't work. I'd really rather she had Mint anyway, since the odd system is harder for me to admin.

So I tried Mint (14) again, and it still won't boot. Watching the messages, I see:
EISA: Cannot allocate resource for mainboard
EISA: Cannot allocate resource for EISA slot 1
(repeats for each slot through
EISA: Detected 0 cards
(eleven more lines of messages, then:)
Key type encrypted registered

That last line is where it hangs.

I've tried various boot options, such as nomodeset, xforcevesa, nouveau.modeset=0, vga=0x314, vga=788 (separately of course), and still get the same result. I've also tried using some of the options from other distros that will boot successfully, but nothing works.

OpenSuse 12.2 from LXF164 boots up just fine, as do the following:
from LXF162: Mageia, PCLinuxOS, Arch64, Debian Live.

These all fail, most giving an immediate gray screen:
Fedora 18 (LXF169), then from LXF162: Fedora Live, Mint Cinnamon Live, CentOS, System Rescue CD (various options, all failed), Ubuntu Live; and Fuduntu from LXF168.

Is there something I can do to make Mint 14 KDE run on this machine? Any help will be greatly appreciated.