Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2009 mails)

[stenhoj@xxxxxx (Niels Stenhøj)]

IMHO this is not a specific SuSE problem. This can happen
to W95, W98 and 2000 as well. I've found that it's a hardware
problem.

Working temperature.
-------------------

   Your machine must reach working temperature before
   booting, installing, partitioning, formatting etc.
   What we are talking about is the fact that the
   coefficient of expansion is not the same for the
   phycical disks as for the arms carrying the RW
   heads of your harddisk. Any misalignment of the
   tracks during the installation or boot process
   can cause the system to hang. In Windoze a symptom
   is a message of failure to access the registry. In
   SuSE it may be a failure to start Samba or another
   module.

   If complying with the rule of letting the machine
   reach working temperatures before actually starting
   saves you for a lot of problems. To accomplish this
   press Del to enter the BIOS menu. after a couple of
   minutes, press Ctrl Alt Del to start the machine.

Installation on a clean hard disk.
---------------------------------

   "And no man putteth new wine into old bottles."

   I admit that despite complying to the above rules,
   installation failures may still occur. To me this
   happens if I try to install a new system on top
   of a hard disk which only has had its master boot record
   erased. So I overwrite the intire disk using the
   OnTrack disk utility (for Quantum zerofill.exe)
   remembering to let the machine reach working temperature
   before starting this utility. Then I partition and
   format the disk and finally I press Ctrl Alt Del to
   let the CD-1 boot and start the installation process.
   I also remember to manually select partitions without
   formatting.
   This way, Yast2 works brilliantly. If you feel sorry to
   (re)configure too much because of this new and virginal
   installation, you may wish to have a look at the back
   up, that you, of course, remembered to burn before even
   thinking of installing a new SuSE release. Else you
   may be lucky to find that a new release has resolved
   sources of irritation.

With regards,

Niels


-- 
To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxx
For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@xxxxxxxx             
Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/support/faq