Re: Older Debian Linux version hangs when detecting hardware
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 07:06:28AM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 02/17/2009 02:03 AM, Martin Willcocks wrote:
> [snip]
> >
> >Error message? None, the installation simply hung. In the bottom right
> >of the screen is a "spinning disk" graphic that stopped spinning about
> >30 seconds into the third part of the installation, Detecting Hardware.
>
> Then maybe a h/w issue? It is, after all, getting old.
Try running the installer in non-GUI mode so that you can switch to the
syslog output and see what you get. I've never run the GUI installer
(your "old" box is newer and more powerful than most of mine) to know
how to access syslog with the GUI.
Open up the box and reseat anything that can move: power cables, memory
simms, expansion cards. Blow out the box; you may have zinc fibres (I
forget the technical term) which can grow off the galvanizing of the
case, or you may have lead fibres off the contacts.
If the box will boot a CD, try a live CD like grml. Its text mode
(although you can start x with it) and has lots of diagnostics programs.
I'd suggest once you get a live system running, that you run e2fsck -c
-c on all ext2/3 filesystems while watching the syslog output. The -c
-c will cause a non-distructive read-write-read check of all blocks in
the filesystem. You actually shouldn't see any errors show up in
syslog; the hard drive firmware should move bad sectors around if it
finds any that it can't write to reliably.
The grml CD also includes a memtest+ boot option so that you can test
all the memory; let it run overnight to get in a few passes.
I'm running Etch on the following hardware:
plot: PII-233 Asus MB with 64 MB ram, 8 GB hard drive.
blitz: dual-PII-450 HP NetServer LPr, 1 GB ram, NetRaid 1si hardware
raid with two 72 GB SCSI drives (hot swap) with two virtual drives (one
raid0 one raid1).
Any box which won't run Debian any more now runs OpenBSD. Since OBSD
has the ability to run most linux programs, you may want to consider it
as a later (not necessarily last) resort. Since OBSD installs from a
floppy boot (or CD), a simple and short download of the installer image
(then put on floppy with dd) gives a simple test. The OBSD dmesg is
particularily detailed.
Doug.
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