Invalid TSS:0038 installing slink on ASUS P5A-B/K62-300

[Jim Skea <jimsk@dft.if.uerj.br>]

I'm trying to install slink on the following system

MB: ASUS P5A-B, Bios 1008 Beta 2
Processor: AMD K6-2-300
HD: Seagate Medalist 4321 (Model ST34321A)
Video: Trident TVGA 8900 CL-B, IMb

The BIOS was flashed from 1007 to 1008B2 to get round a problem
with boot-up errors caused by incorrect reports of voltage
measurements on the MB. Otherwise the system is virgin.

I'm doing the installation from floppies and all goes well
(the Linux partition is initialised fine on a 2G partition
 in /dev/hda1 and there's 64Mb swap on /dev/hda2) but during the
 installation of the base system, I consistently get the following
 rather frightening error

invalid TSS: 0038
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010:[<00113100>]
EFLAGS: 00000246
eax: 00000014 ebx: 016da018 ecx: 00000014 edx: 0024dfc8
esi: 01685c0c edi: 01685c0c ebp: 0111cf34 esp: 0111cf0c
ds: 0018 es: 0018 fs: 003b gs: 002b ss: 0018

Process zcat (pid 2660, process nr: 9, stackpage=0111c000)
Stack: 01d7c440 00000283 0111cf48 00000000 etc. etc. etc.
  (I can provide the rest of the stack if necessary...)

Call Trace: [<0011348e>] [<0012c84c>] [<00125011>]
            [<00183841>] [<0010ce79>] [<0010ac15>]

Code: 39 1d b0 e3 26 00 75 02 0f 06 83 76 38 00 74 1e 86 53 1c 0f

Obviously zcat is having problems unpacking/writing the base
system to the HD?

I've tried tweaking the BIOS, lowering the PIOs on the HD to see
if it was a problem with the IDE bus, but to no avail. Has anyone
else seen this, or have a clue what's going on? I suspect it's
a mobo problem, or a CPU problem (the memory is fine -- I've
tried swapping that).

I'm trying to set this up off my own back for a public school
here, so money's short (hence the cheap Trident video, the
4.3G is the smallest available new HD, the K6-2-300 is pretty
well the cheapest processor available, but on the mobo
we decided to shell out extra on an ASUS, which have the reputation
of being the most reliable mobo easily available in Brazil. It
is rather ironic that it seems to be the component that's causing
the problems). The school doesn't have the money to junk two
(they bought two) MBs, so any ideas which might solve the
problem are gratefully received.

Thanks in advance.

Jim Skea (jimsk@dft.if.uerj.br)