That Live Eval CD is broken. Many people have problems with it. I've tried it on 3 different systems and it failed on all of them. The failures were different on each computer. John Grant wrote:
I have a working 8.1 pro system that I'm thinking about upgrading to 9.1. However, this morning when I tried to boot the system from the 9.1 live CD I get an oops and kernel panic when the boot process tries to load the aic7xxx driver.
The system is an SMP Tyan S2469 motherboard with the built-in Adaptec 7902 SCSI contoller. I initially had a problem booting with this board and the aic7xxx driver under 8.1 too. I worked around that issue by using the "noapic" boot option and have been using that "fix" reliably since then.
Is APIC/ACPI still broke in 2.6 with SMP? The "noapic" workaround didn't seem to have any effect in 9.1, at least not on this problem. Perhaps there's a different method of accomplishing the same thing with the 2.6 kernel that I'm not aware of? Or is this a different problem? (In which case, do I still need to use the noapic option?)
I can get more info if necessary. After wasting several days trying to figure out the noapic thing under 8.1 myself though I thought I'd post my initial experiences with 9.1 & the 2.6 kernel to see if anyone else has seen this and has a fix before I waste too much time on this myself.
TIA for any help...
-John