About a week and a half ago, I came home to find my screen filled with
looked like memory stack dump. At the bottom of the screen were a couple
of lines of text that read (loosely): "Aaiee...tried to kill the idle
task!" and "Kernel panic...killing the interrupt handler." I have been
working this problem on and off ever since then, and still don't have it
solved. The machine is one I assembled from bits, and it is/was running
SuSE Linux 6.0 with kernel 2.2.1. It had 40MB of RAM, but while
troubleshooting, I found that one of my SIMMs was not getting reported as
EDO and so I swapped it and its complement out. The box now has 32MB
RAM. The video card is a generic S3 VirGE/DX with 8(?)MB and 170MHz
RAMDAC. The monitor is a Cornerstone 45/101nf 19".
When I first saw what was on the screen, I tried switching consoles using
the Alt-F* combinations, but that didn't work. I tried telnetting in
from my NetBSD box, but that didn't work. Ctl-C, Ctl-D and Ctl-Alt-Del
were likewise ineffective. So, I resigned myself to being in one of
those states where the computer is truly frozen and switched it off.
When I first tried to reboot, I got the message that my kernel was not a
valid compressed image. Another attempt at reboot gave me a full blown
"Oops: 0000" error message with stack dump. Since then, I have tried
booting with my older kernel (2.2.0), my rescue kernel (2.0.36), Tom's
Root/Boot disk, an emergency disk built on my SuSE Linux box but using an
earlier kernel, a Slackware boot/root disk combination, and (ugh!) a
Windows95 startup disk.
* The emergency disk and the Slackware boot disk fail to boot the
machine, and they give me the error message that there is not enough
memory (although I haven't tried these since troubleshooting my RAM).
* Tom's root/boot disk will either cease booting with the not enough
memory error, or it will begin to boot, get to the point where the vga
mode is to be selected, and then reboot the machine without booting when
a vga mode is chosen. (This seems to be the case, no matter what vga
mode is selected, although I haven't tried all of them yet using
tomsrtbt.)
* The older kernel and the rescue kernel throw the machine into reboot
when the vga mode is selected.
* The Windows95 startup disk seems to have no problem at all and boots
the machine up to the A:\ prompt. That is to say, the machine remains in
an (arguably) useless condition. :-)
* I have also tried several times to just boot "normally", that is,
using my current kernel. The day before yesterday, the machine booted up
to checking the disks with fsck. It got to the partition with my /usr
partition on it and reported that fsck could not complete the check. It
put me into single user mode and told me to do the fsck manually. Since
it was pretty late by then, and since I wanted to read up a bit on manual
fscking, I didn't do it right then. Not wanting to leave the machine
running overnight in its disable condition, I shut it down. (Moral:
Never, ever voluntarily give up a gain you've made towards a solution.)
When I tried to reboot again the next day, I was back at the invalid
compressed image error message or the Oops. The last time I tried to
boot from using my normal kernel, I was presented with a colorful "crazy
quilt" of colored bars about 1/4cm wide and 3/4cm long each filled with
at least one ASCII character. Some of them had more than one character
in them, and in others the characters were blinking.
I am wondering how to proceed, and I am hoping for some advice from the
Linux veterans here on the list. I am thinking that the problem might be
with my video card, since I have recently installed this monitor, and I
suspect that it may be more monitor than this card was designed to
handle. Today I will swap out the video card with an older card I have,
an S3 Trio64V+, and hook up my old 15" Packard-Hell monitor to it to see
what that does.
Other than that, does anyone else have any thoughts on what could be
causing this? Once I get this fixed, I plan on saving my course work
from my C++ classes and then doing a total reinstall as part of a move to
a dual boot Windows98/SuSE Linux 6.0 system. (I need Windows98 for a
programming class, otherwise I would still be Windows-free.)
TIA,
Sean.
Theo. Sean Schulze
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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