On Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:47:11 -0600 Robert Hodgins <ehodgins@telusplanet.net> wrote: > Daniel, thank you for your suggestions. > > > 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/ Hmmmm...not much to go on there, unfortunately. Might have to do the remote console thing and ssh in. > > 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? I don't think so. I was simply wrong about it being bad hardware (most likely). However another poster pointed out that ACPI on a P1 is probably wrong and since the message say it's not giving results the kernel likes, it could certainly apply. Try booting with acpi=off or noacpi (I forget which one, it might be listed in the Install Guide, or on the F1-F10 help pages of the CD (before starting the installer)). I'm thinking the default kernel configuration has changed somehow that doesn't like your board. ACPI is a definite possibility (modern kernels try to use ACPI but boards before ~2000 tend to have buggy or incomplete BIOS implementations of acpi). Also apic and local apic could be a problem. Basically anything that your board tried to support but wasn't up to the standards that eventually came into force, but are what the kernel expects. > 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? Probably. Not 100% but 95% likelihood that this the problem. Assuming no other old hardware that is no longer supported on the system of course. > > > 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? If you look at the install guide you might be able to use a network console and ssh in. Depends of the machine is locked or just the keyboard. Personally I suspect it wouldn't help because if it the ACPI that the problem then the system is hard frozen, not just not responding to input. -- And that's my crabbing done for the day. Got it out of the way early, now I have the rest of the afternoon to sniff fragrant tea-roses or strangle cute bunnies or something. -- Michael Devore GnuPG Key Fingerprint 86 F5 81 A5 D4 2E 1F 1C http://gnupg.org
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