Mandrake 9 installation problem

[Guest sleeping_sloth]

Hello everyone - this is my first post, and it's going to be a long one...

 

Yesterday, having finally had enough of windows crashes and general crapness, I decided to put a copy of Mandrake 9 on my system.

Unfortunately I am a poor student, and couldn't afford to buy an official box, so I bought a DVD magazine with 3 Mandrake CD images on it.

I promptly burnt those onto CD, and rebooted.

When I got to the installation splashscreen, I hit enter for standard installation (I've used Unix, and a few flavours of linux before, but I'd still consider myself a newbie).... something happened, only I wasn't able to see it, because for whatever reason, it didn't show up on my monitor.

 

Next port of call was to try the bootable CD on another PC I have knocking around ( an old cyrix 300Mhz I keep (for some reason)...I know, I know....cyrix??)

Anyway, this booted fine, went straight into the installation process without battering an eyelid. Arse.

 

Now, I'm very proud of my 'new' PC (okay, it's nearly a year old now... :( ), which I built myself, and has the following spec:

 

2x Athlon XP1800+ processors

Asus A7M266-D Motherboard

512MB DDR (PC 2100) RAM

GeForce 4 Ti4600 (PNY Verto) graphics card.

 

I am not very happy that I can't run linux on my decent machine, especially since it runs elsewhere fine. This leads me to believe that possibly there is a problem with my hardware setup, but really I have no idea at all - like I said, I'm really just a newbie to this.

 

Finally, I tried running the installation process in text mode - however, it got as far as the line "..TIMER: vector=0x31 pin 1=2 pin 2=0" (does that mean anything to anyone?) and then it stopped altogether.

 

If anyone could offer me any advice I'd much appreciate it. I need Linux!

Thanks,

Martin

[mtweidmann]

Looking at your list of hardware there is nothing obvious that could make it go wrong. And as you've tested the CDs in another machine its unlikely that they are faulty.

 

You could try booting off CD2, instead of CD1. It used to give you some extra options if you booted off the second CD. EG multi processor machine. I think it still works with v9

[DragonMage]

Since I don't have a dual processor machine and I never installed mandrake 9 on the dual processor machine, I have to ask this question. What happened if you use the second cd to boot instead of the first cd? Does it have a choice where you specifically ask to use the SMP or Enterprise kernel instead of regular kernel?

[mtweidmann]

I don't have a dual cpu system, I just once put the wrong CD in the drive. :( I can't remember which version of mandrake I was using at the time, but it loaded up the installer in text mode. I'm pretty sure there were options for choosing which kernel you wanted.

 

Of course it might not anything to do with it having two cpus, but its worth a try.

[Guest sleeping_sloth]

okay....thanks for the input. Here's what I've done with it....

 

I'm just finishing copying back the 8GBs or so of files I chucked on a mates PC while I was formatting etc (it's nice to have a 6 PC LAN setup in your house :) - like I said, I'm a student...lol)

so I can't reboot the 'problem PC' (god I hate that term in reference to any PC belonging to me :( )

But...I've booted using CD 2 on the cyrix machine, and... no extra options for the kernel. After part of the text install, it requests the first CD again, and then it goes through from the point at which the setup hung on my first PC (I really hope that line made sense...)

I will try booting from that CD anyway, although I'm doubtful as to whether it will work.

I am a little loathe to try it, but I could move the graphics card from the cyrix machine into my first machine, but its a PCI card, and I'd prefer to get it working any other way first. Soon though, my patience will have worn through, and I'll just do it I expect.

If I can't solve the problem by either using CD2, or using a patch I've been given which may help, I'll resort to moving hardware around.

 

Just one more question though - do I actually need a different kernel to make use of MP?

[Guest sleeping_sloth]

bad news I'm afraid...

 

I tried the patch file, but to no avail. I have also tried using a different graphics card, no joy there either - it always reaches the same point, and then crashes.

 

<tearing hair out...lol>

Sloth out

[Ixthusdan]

Are you over clocking anything? Have you had any other odd problems with this computer?

[Guest sleeping_sloth]

Ix,

Nothing overclocked at present - I reset everything before starting the whole formatting and installing process in the first place.

I haven't ever had any problems before with this setup - its gone for nearly a year without anything yet (touch wood).

 

Sloth out

[Ixthusdan]

The symptoms fit either a processor or ram error. Since the machine ran well for a year, I would lean toward ram. Problems with other than the first chip on the card show up in odd ways. And if there is a hardware issue, linux will find it!

If you can, swap the ram out with another machine.

My guess so far.

[Guest sleeping_sloth]

Ahaha... here's something interesting -

I got fed up with Mandrake 9, so I looked around for other CDs, and found a copy of RedHat 7.2 knocking about (I know this is a Mandrake users board...bear with me)

 

Anyway, I installed that with no problems at all. However, if I tell it to use the SMP kernel in grub, as opposed to the 'normal' kernel, the machine locks up at the same point (almost exactly the same text...something to do with timing.) I have a feeling theres some problem with the SMP setup, but have no idea what.

 

Possibly this is why I've spent years tussling with windows. Microsoft seems to be akin to women for me at the moment - can't live with them, can't live without them. arse.

 

Will struggle on anyways...lol

Sloth out

[theYinYeti]

MP in SMP means Multi Processor, hence your problem when you use a SMP kernel on a mono-processor.

Linux is not all that hard to use. But very few hardware vendors do anything to help create good drivers for Linux, as they do for Windows.

So Linux is good if your machine has compatible hardware, and bad if your machine has some incompatible hardware. That's the way it will be until vendors give the same support to Linux than they give to Windows.

 

Yves.

[Guest sleeping_sloth]

Err yeah Yeti. My machine is a multi processing machine... 2 processors.

Sloth out

[theYinYeti]

multi processing machine... 2 processors

Sorry... I thought you were speaking about the cyrix machine... :roll:

[Guest sleeping_sloth]

Okay, here's the score now...

 

I've got Red Hat 7.2 working...but no X windows because I tried using GeForce 3 drivers, and X crashes before I get in . I'm about to try re-installing that using generic VGA drivers, just to see if I can get somewhere. I'm not proficient enough to do much without a GUI at the moment.

 

Interestingly though, when I use the SMP kernel for Red Hat 7.2, I get amost exactly the same error (the TIMING error from earlier...), but there is no problem with the uni-processor kernel.

I'm convinced something has a problem with my dual processor setup, but I can't find any info on what I need to do at Mandrake.com (I want Mandrake really, as I bought this crappy magazine just for Mandrake on the DVD)

 

So... does anyone know anything about how I can go about sorting out an SMP kernel, or what I need to do in order to get this working? I'm pretty clueless on the kernel compiling/use - I've never done it before, and so have no idea - do I need to replace the uni-processor kernel on the CD?

 

Please help! lol

 

Sloth out

[Guest SunnyJim]

I am guessing that you are not using Nvidia drivers yet but I think you've stumbled across your problem. I didn't remember it right away but now it is beginning to come back to me.

 

I used to have problems with my dual CPU system and my GeForce2. You are going to have some problems using Nvidia drivers with SMP unless you use the Nvidia SMP specific drivers. You might have problems anyway -- I used to have lots of problems before putting an ATI card in my SMP machine. My luck with the non-Nvidia drivers was a little better but it burned me that I wasn't getting as good of 3D performance (why else does one buy Nvidia?).

 

Some people have great luck with Nvidia cards. Others don't. Unfortunately, using Nvidia in Linux for me became a luxury I had to do without. It was too much trouble tracking down problems with Nvidia's proprietary kernel patches.

 

You might try borrowing a cheap (non Nvidia) video card just to see if your problems with SMP go away. An old Radeon or even a dirt cheap old ATI Rage card would give you a chance to see how well SMP works for you in Linux. I have an old Radeon and it works great for me but then I don't do intensive gaming -- just the occasional Quake 2 or 3 game and TuxRacer.

 

Let us know what you find out.