Hi folks,
Last week I (not only me) reported a fatal error during M6
installation concerning diskdruid/fdisk.
Answer from bero and Tom indicated that the error was due to a
faulty chipset.
As I owned a motherboard with a chipset dated 1997 I thought,
well, times go by and I've to upgrade some.
Bought a new motherboard. TYAN Trinity 100AT with a VIA MVP3
AGPset.
So I thought, now I have a "modern" chipset, M6 will install.
No way! It still hands me the same errors. Starting diskdruid I
hear a clacking sound and I get the message:
"Error when reading partition table of blockdevice hda. The
following error has ocurred: Invalid or incomplete multibyte or
wide character."
Same happens with /dev/hdb when I press `skip drive'
Changing the BIOS setup like disabling UDMA for both harddisks,
disabling prefetch even setting PIO-mode from auto to the slow 2
never changed the behaviour of fdisk. After the error message I
have to do a complete power off to regain access to my harddisks.
A warmboot or even a hardware-reset leaves me without harddisks.
Although after starting up there is no error message when booting
up M5.3. or SuSE 5.3
Altogether I realized that the whole thing is related to some
optimization code in the install-scripts.
But regard this: Every (optimizable) software I encountered
during my 12 yrs of computer-life installed with default (secure
but slow) settings. After installation you had the opportunity to
soup it up to the linits of your hardware (and more often than
not beyond that limit).
I never ever saw a program, let alone an OS, where the
installation routine was only running on certain machines and
*after* installation you were able to downgrade and make it
usable for all the others.
What will next version be? Only installable on PentiumIII? Once
installed you may tweak some scripts and you are able to use it
with a lower CPU?
Pls forgive me for getting (maybe) to harsh on that topic. I just
spent a couple of Euro on up-to-date hardware without getting
where I wanted to go today!
Wolfgang
(and pls don't give me that crap about a "shaggy chipset" any
more)
--
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