Re: non-install report
Hank Barta <hbarta@gmail.com> writes:
> I've been trying to install some flavor of Debian AMD-64 to a system I
> upgraded last night with little success.
> Hardware
> Abit AV8 with VIA K8T800 Pro/ VT8237 chipset
> SATA/RAID (not in use yet)
> VT8237 IDE
> Audio (AC-97?)
> 3400+ processor
> 512MB/1GM RAM
> (recycled hardware)
> Some year+ old Seagate ATA drive - 130GB
> Ancient #9 video card (S3968)
> Ancient Tulip Ethernet card
> IDE CDROM burner
>
> Trying any of the ISOs that looked like they made sense (anything save
> the netboot) the system was horribly unstable. It ranged from
> rebooting instantly when hitting <return> from the boot prompt to
> locking up while loading modules from the CD or partitioning and
> formatting the hard drive. It did not recognize the on board LAN so I
> put the Tulip card in. It recognized that but DHCP did not work and
> manual configuration resulted in lots of error messages to the
> console.
Can you check your hardware please (yes I saw below). From the
hardware data the board sounds just like an Asus K8V which many of us
have running perfectly so crashes sound strange.
> (Incidentally, it was not clear which ISO I should be using. I
> typically do a network install since I'm on cable Internet. The
> HOW-TO points to two sites for boot images and there are a variety of
> ISOs with no description save the name to explain what they are.
> Puzzling to me, the directory
> http://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/debian-installer/current/cdrom/
> contains no CDROM nor any indication if I am supposed to build one
> from the files found there.)
The names and meaning of the images is the same across all
architectures and described in Debian-Installer somewhere. If you have
a spare minute to dig into it, a patch to the FAQ or a small webpage for
the directory would be welcome.
In Short: /debian-installer/current contains the daily build D-I
images, which does not include a cdrom iso. The cdrom directory
contains the files needed to build a cdrom with debian-cd.
I also wrote a script (far simpler than debian-cd) that uses the same
files to build a netinst cd and I do that iregulary from time to
time. The script is in the tools directory (make-cd) if you want a
newer image.
> The machine was so horribly unstable - crapping out ad a different
> place nearly each try - that I thought that there was some problem
> with the hardware. I tried booting a recent Knoppix CD and it seemed
> to work a *lot* better, though it was not without problem. It
> recognized the on board LAN and sound with no problem, but configured
> my serial mouse systems mouse as a PS/2 mouse. (There is probably a
> boot option to fix that, but I didn't bother. A text console was fine
> with me.) It did also report once that KDE could not start due to
> insufficient RAM (with 1GB available. ;) and once when running a
> command at the shell prompt, I got a "bus error."
It does sound like hardware.
> I ran the Knoppix memory test since last night and it reported no errors.
I have a dual PIII-666 system that never runs longer than 5 minutes,
except when running memtest (which runs flawless without trouble).
If something like the pci dma is broken and sometimes writes to the
wrong memory or something the system won't run long but memtest can't
find such errors. It can also just need a bios upgrade or something.
> I'm in the process of installing Sarge i386 and have just finished
> rebooting. So far it is running flawlessly.
>
> So, I'm wondering how to go about installing one of the 64 bit Debian
> flavors. do I identify my hardware and build a kernel with only
> support for it? I presume that some driver that doesn't belong is
> leading to the instability. then it's DFS for the rest, right?
>
> Suggestions and comments welcomed!
Try installing the 64bit kernel-image-2.6.9-amd64-k8 (from i386) on
your system and boot it. Does it still work then (guessing not). But
if it does you can create a 64bit chroot and see if any of the
binaries trigger the instability and so on.
> <back to my ia32 install :( >
>
> thanks,
> hank
MfG
Goswin
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