Re: Lenny won't install on an old Pentium that used to run Etch. Try 2
Daniel, thank you for your suggestions.
> Assuming you are using the text installer (if you haven't you should,
> just in case), you should be able Alt-F4 to see the system logs (ctrl
> is unnecessary in text mode. Alt-F3 and Alt-F2 should be alternate
> consoles you can use.
I'm using the text installer.
>
> I recommend watching the syslog in Alt-F4 and only switching to Alt-F1
> when you need to do input.
I did this. I hit Alt-F4 as the installer was finishing the formatting
of the hard drive. When the cursor stopped blinking and the keyboard no
longer responded, I took a picture.
I posted it here as Photo 1: http://technicallywrite.blogspot.com/
> Perhaps a kernel fault, or bad CD-ROM
> drive? It could also be bad RAM (have you tried memtest?), or some
> other intermittent fault in hardware (like IDE).
I reinstalled (a minimal) Etch last night. It was successful. Top
and /proc/meminfo both reported that RAM was 127192 KB...very close to
the 128 MB that is in the machine. So, the Etch installer had no issues
with the RAM or other hardware.
Would the Lenny installer be more sensitive to potentially bad RAM or
hardware than the Etch installer?
>
> Basically if you haven't already do so I would test the hardware. You
> seem to have enough RAM so that shouldn't be the issue, and assuming
> good media that leaves hardware or driver problems as the most likely
> causes.
Right after selecting Install, the installer printed the screen (Photo
2) that is at http://technicallywrite.blogspot.com/ I didn't get this
screen when I was installing Etch and I don't recall seeing it when I
installed Lenny on other (more modern) machines. I can't interpret what
it means.
Is it relevant to the failure of the Lenny installer?
> I guess one other possibility is if the installer is not using the 486
> kernel but the 686 one (/var/log/syslog in the installer will tell you
> the answer to that).
When the Lenny installation freezes, the keyboard is locked up. There is
no way to run shutdown -h now. I've just been powering off.
At this stage of the installation, how can I get the /var/log/syslog?
Thank you again for your suggestions and ideas.
Reply to: