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Thread ID: 55966	2005-03-23 22:53:00	Linux has issues with me.	Growly (6)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
337357	2005-03-23 22:53:00	Not a very descriptive title, but there is reason (somewhere): Alright, so after spending $400 of my hard earned cash on high power wireless gear that is supposed to work in linux, I came to installing debian on my chosen machines. For propserity's sake, these are an HP Vectra VL (PII 266MHz, 326MB RAM) and an HP Vectra VE (PI 200MHz, 192MB RAM). These have been working for the past 7 years with various Windows versions, and also many Linux versions also. But it just ain't happening. There are two major issues that murder any hope of running linux before install is complete (help towards either would be fantastic): HP Vectra VE (PI 200MHz, 192MB RAM) gives "Kernel Panic: Attempting to kill init!" on install boot. Whenever I tried running the debian installer, stable or sarge, with kernels 2.4.17, 2.4.theotherone, and 2.6, I get a "Kernel Panic: Attempting to kill init!" before it even loads the installer program. After searching around, this problem has been pointed in some cases at faulty hardware, but I refuse to believe that my precious Vectra's have become faulty overnight. I was wondering what the other causes of this could be, and if anyone else had come across it before. Help please! HP Vectra VL (PII 266MHz, 326MB RAM) freezes, sometimes resets, while debian installer attempts to create filesystem on drives. When using the testing release, the installer crashes after the partitioner tries to write the partition table and apply the respective filesystems to the drives. When I says crashes, I mean that it freezes, often on 14%, or 19% depending on the drive I'm trying to format. When using the stable release (with the 2.4 kernel), the system can initialise the swap partition, but reset while initialising the linux partition (bearing in mind that in the stable installer one can choose to intialise said partitions separately). I'm rather angry about that. I have tried both the ext3 and the ext2 filesystem (both of which have worked in the past). I even changed the CPU. I'm at home, sick, so am reluctant to go venturing through my PCs to find replacement hard drives - but y'all deem it necessary then it will be done. So there you have it - HELP. PLEASE. It's not fair, so much time, so much money, so much effort to bring all the pieces for a single Linux access point together - and nothing works. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!	Growly (6)
337358	2005-03-24 03:56:00	Run a memory tester. Linux (and even Windows) installation is the second best memory test there is. (A kernel compilation is the best. ;)) After the memory test (if it give errors), try unplugging then reseating the memory and try again. (DON'T do this first. There's nothing worse than not knowing ...)	Graham L (2)
337359	2005-03-24 08:53:00	Funny story - shortly after starting this thread I ran memtest86, and found a brand new ram stick to be 100% faulty. I have now removed it, and it installs fine. Except on the first machine, it can't handle testing with 2.6.8.	Growly (6)
337360	2005-03-24 09:52:00	Always the way, lol. The joys of faulty memory.	george12 (7)
337361	2005-03-24 10:09:00	...Except on the first machine, it can't handle testing with 2.6.8. Is this with the same installation disk that worked for the second box? It does sound like you have a duff installation disk. Try re-burning it at a lower speed.	vinref (6194)
337362	2005-03-24 11:53:00	Is this with the same installation disk that worked for the second box? It does sound like you have a duff installation disk. Try re-burning it at a lower speed. Yeah it was - I suspected that that may be the case, but was leaning against it because it worked fine in one PC... Ofcourse now that I've inserted the PCMCIA controller, aftering "successfully" installing Debian stable, I get interrupt handler errors and kernel panics and out of sync IRQ what nots.	Growly (6)
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