Guest birkarl Posted November 17, 2002 Report Share Posted November 17, 2002 Well, I have an 9.0 Powerpack bought in Sweden (Europe) and I am having multiple severe errors on my newly installed machine. I am now on my second installation of the OS, but the results are seemingly the same. 1) Can't install packages through rpmdrake. It says everything is installed. It isn't. Thanks to the support (many thanks to jimdunn!) I narrowed it down a little, fixed a little, and now it may be solved. May, you might ask, well... 2) The DVD- and CDRW-drives are having intermittent errors. They are slow, sluggish and reports 'bad medium' a zillion times. Since #1 above required me to manually reinitialize the urpmi-config, this one really gets me down. I can't do #1 coz of #2. For instance, both drives report that dia-0.90-2mdk.i586.rpm on Installation CD 2 is a directory. Since this is close to what other Duron members reported, I have tried with and without DMA, UDMA, nopentium, and ACPI. No difference whatsoever. 3) After leaving the machine on for several hours, it locks out and do not even respond to ping. I had only KDE/Nvidia going, ACPI disabled on BIOS and in all config panels I could find in the Mandrake Control Center/KDE Control Center. The media works flawlessly on the _same drives_ in Windows 2000 Pro and QNX. The machine: Compaq Presario 5000, 5WV257 with a Duron 700 and 448Mb RAM. HDA: Seagate ST320413A HDB: Quantum Fireball LM20.5 HDC: Compaq DVD DRD8120B HDD: Samsung CDR SW408B M/b: Compaq's own (VIA-based) Gfx: Nvidia GF2 mx400, 32Mb AGP Snd: Soundblaster AudioPCI (Ensoniq) Misc stuff is an Accton NIC, Bt848 TV Card, and a lot of USB-stuff The "fun" thing is that when I installed Mandrake I overwrote a perfect installation of SuSE 8.0, so the machine and *all* internals and externals worked flawlessly in SuSE 8.0 (and, before that, in SuSE 7.3 and 7.2). This machine multiboots and run BeOS, QNX, OS/2 Warp and Windows 2000 Pro without problem. What is going on here? Why is Mandrake acting so bizarre when all these other OS's including the product of an competitor is working just fine? Where's the magic checkbox? I guess this could be due to the newer kernel of 9.0 over the SuSE 8.0, but then shouldn't 'nopentium' do the trick as suggested by others? I tried reading through the kernel changelogs but without any real enthusiasm. Any help appreciated, I just spent the equivalence of some 35-odd pints of lager at my local pub for my box of CDs ;) EDIT: After reading most other threads on this issue, I have two questions: 1) Do MD 9.0 work for anyone using 'nopentium' alone (on from what I can gather, mostly (older?) Duron CPUs)? This should really only affect AGP use, right? 2) Those who disabled DMA/UDMA, can you ENABLE it later? Or will the system start to behave badly once more? And, on a final note, it has come to my attention that friends of my with Durons and SuSE 8.1 have similar problems! Ie - this may very well be a non-Mandrake-specific kernel issue. Any takers? ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest birkarl Posted November 17, 2002 Report Share Posted November 17, 2002 Yup, after trying to install the downloadable SuSE 8.1 on my machine, without any of the kernel-switches, it too behaves irratically, looses packages and stuff so my money's on the new kernel and/or friends of the kernel. (FYI: my next attempt will be to install MD with DMA/UDMA turned off in BIOS, only minimal install, get the 2.4.18 kernel (that was stable on my system in SuSE 8.0), re-enable DMA/ACPI and stuff and see what happens.) Oh, the pain. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Counterspy Posted November 17, 2002 Report Share Posted November 17, 2002 You might try 2.4.19.19 kernel in the Mandrake cooker. You will need to install the kernel related files like initscripts and mkinitrd as well. It may have been fixed in that version. Counterspy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest birkarl Posted November 17, 2002 Report Share Posted November 17, 2002 Ok, it nows seems to work - no more 'medium errors' and other sick stuff. Only weird thing is that my 32x CDRW is now some one hundred times faster than my 8x/40x DVD. This is not normal behaviour for Linux on my system. I installed an old Mandrake 2.4.18 kernel (kernel-2.4.18.8.1mdk-1-3mdk.i586.rpm) and the NVIDIA_kernel for it, fixed my lilo.conf and rebooted _without_ any arguments passed to the kernel and with full DMA/UDMA enabled in the BIOS. Reports from 'hdparm' is fully on par with what I learnt to expect when using other distros, and shows I use (U)DMA on all devices. (*Finally* some good news for me :P) So far, nothing seems to be wrong, EXCEPT that the first install messed up my (u)rpm(i)-database, so I had to rebuild that one. Still, I will now proceed to installing an old and trusted distribution as tomorrow (monday) I need to be able to earn a living on this machine once more. If someone else with a problematic Duron do this thingy, I'd appreciate feedback whether or not it helped you out. /Cheers, Pez Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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