Thanks for the email and apologies for the delay! I had time to work on the machine and I want to make sure I understand your suggestion - things are not working yet .
When the machine boots, I get a grub screen that allows m e to choose between 4 kernels (2 versions, and their debug version twins). I select this one, Scientific Linux (3.10.0-229.20.1.el7.x86_64) 7.1 Nitrogen The I press " e " and am in some sort of editor. T hen append "clocksource=acpi_pm" to the linux16 line, so it reads something like: linux16 /vmlinuz-3.10.0-229.20.1.el7.x86_64 root=UUID=b7.....etc ro rhgh quit Lang=en... systemd.debug *clocksource=acpi_pm* then Ctrl-x to boot? I've done this with hpet, acpi_pm and jiffies and i n every case, the tsc error appears and the machine refuses to boot. The machine also refuses to run the installation CD (I assume b/c its trying to so the same kernel boot?). Does this sound like a hardware error? The (intel) bios is updated (and that seems successful). Is there a well-known trouble-shooting utility that I can use to diagnose bad mb, bad cpu, bad memory, etc? Any suggestions would be welcome! Nathan On 12/18/2015 05:19 PM, Nathan Moore wrote: > ... > In the time since (after turning freq scaling back on, and occasionally > before), I've seen the "Fast TSC calibration failed" error during boot. > This error locks up the machine and it doesn't make it to the login screen. > > Most of the google results from this error call it harmless. Does it > sound like this error relates to my hardware (rather than SL7?) > > My Dell Precision M6500 throws the Fast TSC Calibration error every three or four boots; it doesn't lock it up (in fact, it threw the error when I booted it today, and it's still running several hours later). Are you booting up with full kernel logging enabled rather than being in quiet mode.
