From: aeichsta@athena.mit.edu (Andrew J. Eichstaedt) Subject: Help! Random crashes! (Installation troubles) Date: 8 Apr 1993 13:54:44 GMT
Well, I hope it's not as bad as that---but the crashes I'm getting as I try
to install Linux from the SLS distribution (the latest---dowloaded last week)
seem more or less random to me.
I'm using a generic 386/40 clone with a WD1007A-SE2 controlling a Maxtor
XT-4170E. I'm using 4 or 5 Mb RAM. (I tried installation with both.)
My disk setup is as follows.
Disk /dev/hda: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 297 cylinders
...and...
/dev/hda1 1 1 265 133559+ 83 Linux extfs
/dev/hda2 266 266 297 16128 82 Linux swap
Several things happen:
- mke2fs -c /dev/hda1 133559 dumps core or crashes with
an error that starts out like this:
general protection: 0000
EIP: 0008:0010EBBF
EFLAGS: 00010207
fs: 0017
base: 00000000, limit: C0000000
Pid: 8, process nr: 2
...etc, etc, etc...
- The system spontaneously reboots during the installation
(a or b series disks; that's as far as I've gotten).
- The system dies with a swap/paging sort of error
- The system hangs in the middle of installation; ^Z suspends
doinstall and causes floppy-drive error messages to be
displayed.
I've tried a number of different things in an attempt to get rid of these
problems:
- Re-downloading installation disks.
- Removing all other boards (like serial/parallel) from the machine.
- Trying a couple different video boards. (One was a Trident
82-something-or-other; error frequency seemed to decrease after
putting a cheap, generic VGA card in its place.)
- Reseating the SIMMS and then removing a meg of slightly older
memory that I suspected might be bad. (There was a post a while
ago from a person who cleared up swap/paging errors by reseating
his SIMMS).
No luck, however.
One thing that annoys me in particular is that I had the full system more or
less running before trying to reinstall linux from scratch. What happened
was that, after an installation without too much trouble, there were numerous
hard disk IO errors and occasional crashes. I then discoverd that ESDI drive
controllers are like RLL or MFM controllers (and unlike IDE controllers) in
that they don't prevent mkfs (or mke2fs, which I used) from using the bad
spots on the disk. Having discovered the -c option for mke2fs, I
began my attempt to reinstall linux, with all these unhappy results.
I'm pretty confident that my hardware is working OK. It (excluding disk and
controller) was a DOS/Windows system that worked just fine since it was
purchase last November.
Thanks for any suggestions you can give!
Andrew Eichstaedt
AEichsta@Athena.MIT.Edu