I think your video card has nothing to do with it.
Try giving "mem=8M" or something like that at the LILO prompt. Maybe it
sometimes detects your memory size wrong.
Is your memory fast enough for your BIOS settings ?
Anyway, next time you get an Oops, write everything down and read
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/oops-tracing.txt. Once you have followed its
instructions you have something the kernel developpers can analyse, in
case you have a real kernel bug.
Frank
On Sun, 2 May 1999, T. Sean (Theo) Schulze wrote:
> 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]
> **************************************************
> The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity.
>
>
>
