Bug#412397: Etch net install hangs at beginning of net package download on nforce 4 mb
Package: Etch net installer
Version: rc1
Installer hangs after installing base system and after having asked for
the location of the repository server to download packages from the net.
The progress bar is about 5% through when it hangs. No display of the
file number (e.g. file 10 of 643) has been made. Happens with both the
x86 and x86-64 versions.
USEFUL INFO.
The PC is using a Gigabyte GA-M55SLI-S4 nforce4 motherboard with F8 BIOS
version. This motherboard has a single onboard ethernet port attached to
the chipset direct. A previous version of the board called GA-K8N had
TWO ethernet ports onboard, one attached to the chipset, and one on the
PCI-express bus. CPU is an Athlon 64 X2 3800+. I gig of DDR2-667 ram,
ATI x550 PCI-E graphics card. Am using SATA hard disks plugged into the
onboard nforce4 SATA ports. Installing from optical drive master
attached to on board PATA port number 2. I have three optical drives
attached, 1 to IDE port 1, and two to IDE port 2.
During the early part of the install, the Etch installer thinks that my
GA-M55SLI-S4 motherboard has two ethernet ports, and asks which one i
want to use. Eth0 is shown as a generic port, eth1 is shown as a
specific port with a chip identification number, which correctly
identifies the onboard nvidia ethernet port. I select this one.
The other port is seemingly some kind of phantom port that does not
actually exist. I suspect that during the later part of the net install,
the install routine tries to use this non-existent port, or somehow gets
confused about which port to use, which would perhaps explain why the
install process hangs at the start of the net download phase.
Interestingly I have seen the name GA-K8N appear either during the Etch
install or that of another Linux system, showing that Linux identifies
my board as this other previous board. Perhaps this in turn explains why
it thinks there are two ethernet ports instead of one.
I have successfully installed various Ubuntu and Kubuntu versions
(currently using Feisty Herd 3 as I type this email), also openSuse
10.2, Fedora Core 6, Sidux, etc. Windows XP is running ok too.
Hope this helps.
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