Hi guys, This is more of a hardware issue, I believe, than software, but we are trying to install FC1 so I think it counts, right? :-) At any rate...
The patient is a friend's aging Celeron 433 from CompUSA. Un-branded baby-ATX mobo, sporting a SiS 5595 southbridge chipset, onboard audio/video/usb, socket 370. 256 MB RAM, split among one 128 and two 64 MB sticks (PC100 SDRAM). Wimpy 185 max wattage PS, but there's only one Seagate 4.something HD, one 48X Max CD-ROM, and floppy drive. The problem is we have been wholly unsuccessful in installing jack squat on this thing. Further maddening is the fact that the only reliable outcome is that it WILL choke somewhere along the way. Where, and how, remains largely random. I really believe it is a faulty mobo or CPU to blame, but I wanted to present the symptoms for someone else who may be able to give a more authoritative "I agree." As I mentioned, in most instances, the installation process simply freezes at a random point. However, some minor patterns did emerge. If booting from CD, the boot process was most likely to freeze at one of the following two points: Immediately after RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0 or at running /sbin/loader... Turning off the framebuffer (as /sbin/loader is the point at which that appears to begin making a difference) actually proved to be detrimental---with the nofb boot option, often the left third of the screen would become filled with a column of garbage characters (in textmode---the one time X successfully started, there were a couple columns of garbled and reflected pixels [snowy images of other parts of the screen], and it froze, so we stuck to textmode from then on). Using the mediacheck option sometimes managed to push the process through to the media verification, during which (somewhere in the 20% range) the computer spontaneously rebooted itself. Booting from floppy and attempting an FTP install most commonly froze after Transferring Fedora/base/netstg2.img, before anaconda was launched. A few times, Anaconda was launched and got as far as detecting the video, monitor, and mouse before freezing. Once, ONCE, the process got as far as completing Disk Druid. Once. Out of what felt like hundreds of attempts. Only twice did the process get even as far as selecting Desktop, Laptop, Server, or Custom installation variety. We've played with RAM timing (the primitive Award bios, the most recent available for that hardware being two years old, offered little Wait State adjustment [0WS or 1WS]---that was one suggestion we came across...also futzed with SDRAM Input and Output signal timing), IDE transfer modes, and other sundry BIOS options, generally to no perceivable avail. Other common exits were the infuriatingly vague "Installer terminated abnormally," or a Kernel Panic claiming inability to mount root file system at either 09:01 or 48:03 (I believe). cpio: bad magic was also a common apparently nonfatal error, which seemed to be loosely tied to enabling 32-bit IDE transfers. We reseated everything multiple times. I noted that the first two DIMM slots seemed rather loose; I don't know if they were electrically loose, but they definitely felt as though they did not have a strong mechanical grip on the DIMMs. I borrowed some RAM from a friend to swap out. memtest86 crashed at about 60%. I don't think the ram sticks themselves are to blame. We tried numerous IDE cable swaps. Unhooking the CD-ROM. Unhooking the HD, just to see if it would boot all the way (it still randomly froze). The absolutely most maddening, frustrating aspect is that insanity reigned supreme---meaning that exactly the same input often yielded wildly differing results. Other distros that failed to boot successfully included SuSE Live Eval 9.0, Knoppix 3.3, Red Hat Linux 9. WinXP also failed to make it all the way through the boot process. So the total of all that makes me think it's hardware. Anyone able to evaluate these symptoms and say "yeah, you're probably right?" If there's something we're missing, we'd love to know about it. My friend is new to the linux world and is eager to plunge in and learn his way around FC. If anyone has an old mobo with the same baby-ATX form factor sporting Socket 370, or a Socket 370 processor around 433MHz they'd be willing to lend or part with so we can try other hw, let me know. I'd definitely appreciate it. Thanks a lot for wading through all this and offering any insight. Cheers, ~Brian -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
