Slackware 13.1 Install Error
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From: Edwin Johnson on 16 Jul 2010 10:24 I am trying to install Slackware 13.1 in an older computer with a Centaur VIA 800mHz chip and containing a 40gig HD, a 3.5" floppy, CD drive, and 640 meg RAM. When booting using the install CD, I must use huge.s rather than the hugesmp.s image as a note tells me the latter will not work. I've divided the HD into four partitions, two large and two small, the last to be used for swap and will install the system on /dev/sda1 or the first partition. During formatting of the HD first partition, I am getting the dreaded "Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt" error. This error does not appear at any time until formatting the drive. BIOS is reporting all peripherals correctly and the memory check is fine. TOPS shows memory correct. At first, my feeling was that this was a HD controller error and found another 40gig drive which contained Win(ugg!)98 on it as well as a Linux partition. I booted the drive to dos and Win(ugg!) and all worked correctly. I then decided to reformat the Linux partition, /dev/sda3, which would not touch the other partitions after booting up again with the Linux install disk. I received the same error as above. Thus, it appears the problem is _not_ the HD itself. I have read of this error in various links, but nothing I've tried, such as pci=nomsi, ide=nodma, pci=noapci, etc. has worked. I eventually used the command line, mkfs.ext2 -c /dev/sda1, to format and check for bad blocks so that I could perhaps see what was going on. Could this be some strange reaction of Linux and the VIA or older motherboard architecture? The sada drivers have been suggested in some cases read about. Incidentally, reverting to Slackware 12.2, produces the same results. Also, I may note that I installed Slackware 13.1 on a Panasonic CF-45 with a 450mHz ? Pentium III chip and it all went fine. The error is only occurring at the time of formating the partition. Any help would be appreciated. ....Edwin -- ____________________________________________________________ "Once you have flown, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, there you long to return."-da Vinci http://bellsouthpwp2.net/e/d/edwinljohnson
From: Danno on 16 Jul 2010 14:10 On Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:24:59 GMT Edwin Johnson <edwinljohnson(a)bellsouth.net> wrote: > I am trying to install Slackware 13.1 in an older computer with a Centaur > VIA 800mHz chip and containing a 40gig HD, a 3.5" floppy, CD drive, and 640 > meg RAM. > <snip> I ran Slack on an VIA C3 a long while ago, but my recollection is pretty vague. I seem to recall having to set the BIOS option "PnP aware OS?" to "No", let the kernel sort things out on its own. TBH, I'm not even sure if that's relevant with a modern kernel, but worth a shot. Also, 640M RAM - is that 128 onboard, and a 512 stick in the DIMM slot? Did you try booting just the onboard, or just a single stick, of RAM? When you say the memory test is fine, are you referring to the BIOS memory test? Have you tried running memtest, just to determine if your RAM is still in working order? http://www.memtest.org/#downiso From this page : http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-kernel-70/kernel-panic-not-syncing-attempted-to-kill-init-313273/ The most-important thing to realize about this message is... what it is actually saying. (It's all "geek speak," so bear with me.) (0) A "kernel panic" happens when the kernel realizes that it is hopeless to continue. (If that happened to you, well, "you'd panic too.") (1) When Linux starts, it automagically creates one process. That's "process #1," and its name is init. I don't need to explain here all of the things that init (and "init" alone...) does: the important thing to know is, "init" is not allowed to die. (1a) If "init" does die, for whatever reason, the message given is deceptive: it says that someone "attempted to kill 'init,'" when the actual truth is just that "'init' died." (2) The computer does a lot of disk-I/O activity "in the background." So, there's a tiny amount of time that passes between a request to write something to the disk, and the point in time when that disk-write is physically complete. Bottom line is... "not syncing" is good, and "syncing" means that you just scribbled your disk. Don't ask me why. (3) The real problem that you need to actually be concerned about is described in the messages that precede this one. Not "this one!" That's about all I've got for ya, HTH. -- Slackware 12.2, 2.6.27.7, Core i7 920, GeForce 8400 GS RLU #272755
From: Eef Hartman on 16 Jul 2010 14:27 Edwin Johnson <edwinljohnson(a)bellsouth.net> wrote: > I am trying to install Slackware 13.1 in an older computer with a Centaur > VIA 800mHz chip and containing a 40gig HD, a 3.5" floppy, CD drive, and 640 > meg RAM. 40GB disk as in "parallel IDE", not S-ATA yet? The whole disk handling changed a LOT in 2.6.26 (and higher) kernels (as supplied in Slackware 12.2 and later) so those kernels may have big problems with older IDE disks (the .s in the boot image means it is using scsi/sata access for the root partition, not IDE anymore, that's also why the install kernel is calling it sda and not hda anymore). The install kernel itself doesn't have the problem as ITS root is a ramdisk, not _your_ harddisk. You may need to create - during the install - a custom initrd (INITial RamDisk) with the right drivers (IDE, not ahci/sata) for YOUR motherboard and NOT use the huge.* kernel but the generic one (the huge one got S-ATA support built-in, not as modules). On _my_ older systems I'm still using 10.2 with the 2.6.1? kernel, nothing beyond the 2.6.26 change. PS: you _may_ try 12.1, that one was still distributed with 2.6.24 while 12.2 came with 2.6.27, beyond the big rewrite of the kernel. -- ****************************************************************** ** Eef Hartman, Delft University of Technology, dept. SSC/ICT ** ** e-mail: E.J.M.Hartman(a)tudelft.nl - phone: +31-15-27 82525 ** ******************************************************************
From: Martin on 16 Jul 2010 15:49 Eef Hartman wrote: > Edwin Johnson <edwinljohnson(a)bellsouth.net> wrote: >> I am trying to install Slackware 13.1 in an older computer with a Centaur >> VIA 800mHz chip and containing a 40gig HD, a 3.5" floppy, CD drive, and >> 640 meg RAM. > > 40GB disk as in "parallel IDE", not S-ATA yet? > The whole disk handling changed a LOT in 2.6.26 (and higher) kernels > (as supplied in Slackware 12.2 and later) so those kernels may have > big problems with older IDE disks (the .s in the boot image means it > is using scsi/sata access for the root partition, not IDE anymore, > that's also why the install kernel is calling it sda and not hda > anymore). The install kernel itself doesn't have the problem as ITS > root is a ramdisk, not _your_ harddisk. > You may need to create - during the install - a custom initrd > (INITial RamDisk) with the right drivers (IDE, not ahci/sata) for > YOUR motherboard and NOT use the huge.* kernel but the generic one > (the huge one got S-ATA support built-in, not as modules). > On _my_ older systems I'm still using 10.2 with the 2.6.1? kernel, > nothing beyond the 2.6.26 change. > > PS: you _may_ try 12.1, that one was still distributed with 2.6.24 > while 12.2 came with 2.6.27, beyond the big rewrite of the kernel. I think you're up a blind alley. The kernel itself has two IDE drivers, namely the old ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL driver (now deprecated) and the newer SATA/PATA driver. Both are perfectly up to the job even in the most recent kernel. Slackware itself switched to the SATA/PATA driver at some point, but this is only an issue for people with IDE disks upgrading their Slack installation. For a new install there is no problem whatsoever with IDE support. Martin
From: Eef Hartman on 16 Jul 2010 16:10
Martin <no(a)spam.invalid> wrote: > I think you're up a blind alley. The kernel itself has two IDE drivers, > namely the old ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL driver (now deprecated) and the newer > SATA/PATA driver. Both are perfectly up to the job even in the most recent > kernel. Yes, but "huge.s", being a monolitic kernel, no modules, only uses a SINGLE one of those schemes (the "libata" one) and mostly even through ahci, which only newer bios/sata controllers support (haven't checked this, but I think some of the more common S-ata drivers ARE included too in huge.s). That's why I suggested going for a initrd with "your own" drivers. Best, of course, always is building your own custom kernel with "exactly what you need for this system", but I'm not sure the OP is up to that. -- ****************************************************************** ** Eef Hartman, Delft University of Technology, dept. SSC/ICT ** ** e-mail: E.J.M.Hartman(a)tudelft.nl - phone: +31-15-27 82525 ** ****************************************************************** |