fedora 12 install woes
in [UK Linux]
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From: Jim Price on 10 Jan 2010 08:19 davesurrey wrote: > "Jim Price" <d1version(a)hotmail.com> wrote in message > news:hib9ai$e5f$1(a)news.eternal-september.org... > >> I've found the k7s5a works better with modern distros if you disable any >> unused hardware in the BIOS (game port, modem, serial, parallel and floppy >> spring to mind), load the safe settings and enable the USB support >> options. If they aren't there, your BIOS is old. The most recent one is >> dated near the end of 2003, and was released at the beginning of 2004. >> Previous ones had more bugs and didn't cope with USB devices very well. >> Sadly, updating them can have its own problems, but on the bright side, it >> is almost impossible to brick if you have a floppy drive. The k7s5a does >> not support DDR2, just SDRAM or DDR, so you don't have DDR2 in it or it >> would not work at all. >> >> >> The k7s5a can have all sorts of trouble depending on what graphics card >> and other hardware you have plugged into it, and there will be some as the >> basic version is USB v1 and doesn't have a built in graphics or network >> card. AGP is 4x, and newer 8x cards can cause trouble despite the >> manufacturer claiming they are 4x compatible. A 4x/8x Nvidia 5200 with >> Ubuntu/Debian caused me large amounts of grief with that mobo, so what >> graphics card you have is probably worth knowing. Also, which version of >> the motherboard? - there were at least 3. I have version 3.1 boards, which >> is the one which supports athlonXP processors. If you have a version 1.1 >> board, what YaZoR said applies. >> >> My test machine is also a k7s5a (actually I have three) - I'll try fedora >> 12 on it if you find my suggestions don't work, as I think you are being a >> little to quick to dismiss hardware problems. I'm not as dismissive of the >> k7s5a as YaZoR, as although it has its issues, I have normally got mine to >> play ball eventually, and I've not had any actual reliability problems >> with them. The earliest BIOS update I have for mine dates from January >> 2002, so they've been going a long time. >> > Thanks Jim for your comprehensive post. > > The mobo is I believe the 3/27/03 release. > system bios dated 3/27/03 > video bios 10/22/03 > The modem, games port, midi were already disabled but I disabled serial and > parallel as well. > You are of course correct in that my RAM is not DDR2. My typo. > > It has 2 IDE drives > Maxtor 6Y080LU (80GB) sda > and Maxtor 6Y120P0 (120GB) sdb > > plus 2 dvd writers > HT-DT-ST-DVDRAM GSA-4163B > and SONY RW DRU-500A > I have disabled these to no avail. > > plus nVidia GeForce FX5200 video card. > > The fedora install is on sdb1 and I'm booting using grub2 on Ubuntu 9-10 > sitting on sda3. > I have tried using the grub stanza that ubuntu generates plus added my own > manually. No difference. > > The boot sequence stops with messages... > " vfs cannot open root device sdb1 or unknown block.... > please apend a correct "root=" boot option. > Kernel panic....not syncing :VFS : unable to mount root fs on unknown > block." > > However grub certainly has "root=sdb1" in it as well as the UUID. > > If you can get yours to run without kernel panics then it would certainly > point to a h/w issue > somewhere on mine that is not affecting the other13 distros on here. And > also confirm how sensitive fedora seems to be. Just tried the liveCD, and it had a crash on booting in apic.c, but still made it to the desktop. This suggests noapic might be worth a shot, although it isn't needed for any other distribution I've tried on that machine, which is slightly odd. Another possibly co-incidental effect was my router went unresponsive when I booted the liveCD. The upside of that was it re-synced 50% faster when I rebooted it! There will be a variable length delay while I have a play with it. My machine already has Ubuntu 9.10 and 8.04 on it, but only legacy grub and I gave away the Nvidia 5200 last year as it caused so much trouble, so it has an old Radeon in it. BIOS is the Jan 2004 version. I've stuck a second drive in it, and might as well stick grub2 on there, so it will be pretty similar to your setup apart from the graphics card and it only has 1 512MB stick of SDRAM. It has a realtek 8169 network card too. -- JimP
From: Martin Gregorie on 10 Jan 2010 09:17 On Sun, 10 Jan 2010 02:27:05 +0000, davesurrey wrote: > It has 2 IDE drives > Maxtor 6Y080LU (80GB) sda > and Maxtor 6Y120P0 (120GB) sdb > I used to swear by Maxtor (FWIW my OS-9/68K system is running flawlessly on a 120 MB Maxstor drive that's at least 15 years old - that's when I picked it up as a used drive). Then I swore at them while replacing a disk or two that died fairly rapidly. Now I don't use them at all (apart from the seemingly bullet proof 120MB disk). -- martin@ | Martin Gregorie gregorie. | Essex, UK org |
From: Jim Price on 10 Jan 2010 12:53 Jim Price replied to his own post which said: > davesurrey wrote: >> However grub certainly has "root=sdb1" in it as well as the UUID. >> >> If you can get yours to run without kernel panics then it would >> certainly point to a h/w issue >> somewhere on mine that is not affecting the other13 distros on here. >> And also confirm how sensitive fedora seems to be. > > Just tried the liveCD, and it had a crash on booting in apic.c, but > still made it to the desktop. OK, I had to do the installation with only one disk in the machine. I chose the default options to install to the whole disk. The installation ran to completion, and it's now mid way through 663 updates. The modules which caused the crash booting the liveCD are getting updated, so when that has finished I will know if there are any remaining probs. With both hard disks installed, the install got about half way through and the whole machine froze, so I'm thinking it might be something to do with having more than one disk in the machine. > There will be a variable length delay while I have a play with it. My > machine already has Ubuntu 9.10 and 8.04 on it, but only legacy grub and > I gave away the Nvidia 5200 last year as it caused so much trouble, so > it has an old Radeon in it. BIOS is the Jan 2004 version. I've stuck a > second drive in it, and might as well stick grub2 on there, so it will > be pretty similar to your setup apart from the graphics card and it only > has 1 512MB stick of SDRAM. It has a realtek 8169 network card too. I've just realised that using the default install, Fedora 12 won't boot directly from Ubuntu's grub2, as it doesn't understand the default lvm in F12. It might be possible to chainload it I suppose. I put the original disk back in the machine after the install, and used the BIOS boot menu (not sure if that is in your BIOS) to boot into Fedora to run the updates. Ironically, the crash still happens, but it only seems to affect the boot reporting tool... <fx:time passing> OK, updates completed, and Fedora 12 is running fine as far as I can tell. Looks like the abrt crashes were fixed with the updates. In the end the only things I had to do to get around any probs were to do the basic install with just one disk in the machine, and install updates from yum, as the graphical software update tool failed all over the place. Conclusion: it does install and run on a K7S5A, but seems a little dependent on hardware configuration during the install. No kernel panics, and only a small number of app crashes prior to updates. It's now running fine with both disks installed. The obvious suggestion is you try removing your other disk, and see if that helps. The other possibilities are the remaining hardware and firmware differences, or some physical fault. -- JimP
From: Baron on 10 Jan 2010 14:30 Jim Price Inscribed thus: > Jim Price replied to his own post which said: >> davesurrey wrote: > >>> However grub certainly has "root=sdb1" in it as well as the UUID. >>> >>> If you can get yours to run without kernel panics then it would >>> certainly point to a h/w issue >>> somewhere on mine that is not affecting the other13 distros on here. >>> And also confirm how sensitive fedora seems to be. >> >> Just tried the liveCD, and it had a crash on booting in apic.c, but >> still made it to the desktop. > > OK, I had to do the installation with only one disk in the machine. I > chose the default options to install to the whole disk. The > installation ran to completion, and it's now mid way through 663 > updates. The modules which caused the crash booting the liveCD are > getting updated, so when that has finished I will know if there are > any remaining probs. With both hard disks installed, the install got > about half way through and the whole machine froze, so I'm thinking it > might be something to do with having more than one disk in the > machine. > >> There will be a variable length delay while I have a play with it. My >> machine already has Ubuntu 9.10 and 8.04 on it, but only legacy grub >> and I gave away the Nvidia 5200 last year as it caused so much >> trouble, so it has an old Radeon in it. BIOS is the Jan 2004 version. >> I've stuck a second drive in it, and might as well stick grub2 on >> there, so it will be pretty similar to your setup apart from the >> graphics card and it only has 1 512MB stick of SDRAM. It has a >> realtek 8169 network card too. > > I've just realised that using the default install, Fedora 12 won't > boot directly from Ubuntu's grub2, as it doesn't understand the > default lvm in F12. It might be possible to chainload it I suppose. I > put the original disk back in the machine after the install, and used > the BIOS boot menu (not sure if that is in your BIOS) to boot into > Fedora to run the updates. Ironically, the crash still happens, but it > only seems to affect the boot reporting tool... > > <fx:time passing> > > OK, updates completed, and Fedora 12 is running fine as far as I can > tell. Looks like the abrt crashes were fixed with the updates. In the > end the only things I had to do to get around any probs were to do the > basic install with just one disk in the machine, and install updates > from yum, as the graphical software update tool failed all over the > place. What graphics card ? > Conclusion: it does install and run on a K7S5A, but seems a > little dependent on hardware configuration during the install. No > kernel panics, and only a small number of app crashes prior to > updates. It's now running fine with both disks installed. The obvious > suggestion is you try removing your other disk, and see if that helps. > The other possibilities are the remaining hardware and firmware > differences, or some physical fault. > -- Best Regards: Baron.
From: davesurrey on 10 Jan 2010 15:01
"davesurrey" <dave(a)antispam.invalid> wrote in message news:4b48ad38$0$2492$db0fefd9(a)news.zen.co.uk... > The HDD on my test PC gave up this seek so I have been installing a bunch > of distros used for testing. > All went well except for trying to install Fedora 12 (x86 version). > > I used the very same Live CD that I had previously used for 2 installs, > which allows me to do an install to HDD but in both cases it reports a > kernel error and refuses to get past the stage of updating the software. > > I did a new download of the live CD but same results...kernel panic. Now > after a reboot it even refuses to boot up ...again error reported is > kernel panic. > > I have also downloaded the DVD and this would not even boot without > setting all BIOS boot options to CD. Then the install crashed 3 times at > various stages before I gave up. > > Questions to those who have experience of Fedora 12. > > 1. from Google it seems kernel panics and fedora are common. Is there a > way around for this? I can't imagine such a prestigious distro really is > this bad. > 2. Anyone any experience of using the DVD for an install? It does seem > second rate and a bit "dodgy" compared with the Live CD > 3. I saw somewhere on my Google travels that "fedora needs a separate boot > partition". Is this the case with version 12? I don't remember having this > on the previous install which booted okay. > > FWIW I have fedora on primary partition sdb1 formatted as ext4 and booted > by grub2 in Ubuntu 9.10 > Fairly old K7S5A mobo with Athlon xp 1800 cpu and 1GB ddr2 ram. > All other distros work just fine in this PC. > > I'd really like to try fedora 12 and don't want to give up but it isn't > helping itself. > Thanks for any help. > > Dave To all who have posted here: 1. I am very grateful for your help and ideas. 2. I had to deal with an emergency today so could not work on this problem nor reply to you all but am starting now. I'll let all know how it goes, I'll use all your suggestions (apart from throwing the Mobo away, just yet ) :-) 3. some of you have suggested that I have been too quick to disgard the theory that it is hardware related. You are correct. But I am now going to have a good look at eliminating the hardware as best I can. The reason for my reluctance is that several months ago I was having strange booting problems and all and sundry suggested it was due to my hardware. I practically rebuilt the PC changing all the main components including PSU but in the end it was a software issue as I had suspected. Once bitten twice shy comes to mind. But I now am taking on board all hardware issues that have been mentioned. Cheers Dave |