Weird booting / re-booting problem

[dattaway at attaway.net]

On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Bradley Miller wrote:

> Ok -- this PC followed me home last night . . . (no wonder my electric
> meter looks like a car odometer).  Anyway, I decide "hmm, a 2 gig drive and
> a 12 gig, let's play with Trustix install.  It's a P200 with 32 mb of
> memory -- an old HP Vector PC.  Overall a nice little box.   I started
> initially to do a Mandrake 8.2 install, but decided that a new server box
> would be a better idea.  I installed Trustix with no problems.  Then when I
> get to the Lilo screen I can boot to Linux or DOS (which isn't working, but
> I was just trying that out).   Once it goes into Linux it says it's booting
> and then it restarts the PC.  Very strange . . . any suggestions on
> tracking down problem?

I found out last week that trying to run a kernel compiled for a Pentium
III will cause the original Pentium to promptly reboot immediately after
uncompressing.  If it happens after that while going down the list of
hardware initialization, then that indicates contention on the bus with
memory, IO, race conditions, component failure, or power supply problems.

If that wasn't enough, I found out the correct kernel would boot if the
bus speed wasn't twice the motherboard's rated spec.

Why drive a car when you can ride a bike?
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