9.1 Live CD won't boot working 8.1 pro system
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
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 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 | | Same problem here while trying to install the live cd into VMware which emulates a SCSI disk. Claudiu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFAp61qscHOkmkK0W0RAsbiAJ0eqyiKSo+U9rCVO7500IAffupYdACfdTk8 vBEFig+c+46pp2faSTQuhaU= =xh7t -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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
Same here. In my case it freezes right after making the selection for boot up, no matter what option is selected, without giving any error messages. My box is an Athlon XP 2800+ on an ASUS A7N8X-E board. Is nobody at SuSE paying attention? The LiveCD is supposed to provide "good advertisement" for them, not bad!! It would be better to reduce the features but improve the hardware compatibility on the single CD. Carlos On May 16, 2004 03:39 pm, James Knott wrote:
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.
--
Same here. In my case it freezes right after making the selection for boot up, no matter what option is selected, without giving any error messages. My box is an Athlon XP 2800+ on an ASUS A7N8X-E board.
Is nobody at SuSE paying attention? The LiveCD is supposed to provide "good advertisement" for them, not bad!! It would be better to reduce the features but improve the hardware compatibility on the single CD.
Carlos
On May 16, 2004 03:39 pm, James Knott wrote:
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.
-- I took the Live CD to the neighbor who wanted to try SuSE... he has a Dell desktop. The bootup frozed at his PCMCIA device lookup (he has none) and
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sunday 16 May 2004 19:33, Carlos F Lange wrote: that was that. He opted for Knoppix. - -- ...CH Avoid doing business with 'The Link' ISP. SuSE Is All U Need Linux user# 313696 Linux box# 199365 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAqAzw1rD/PgIdojIRAnMdAJ9kmEBVvyWiLduJXHI4Vf2VdjF9dQCgiZ4H Ih+Iyc8qIPgwImi/YoujIag= =ysSu -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Sun, 2004-05-16 at 20:53, C Hamel wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Same here. In my case it freezes right after making the selection for boot up, no matter what option is selected, without giving any error messages. My box is an Athlon XP 2800+ on an ASUS A7N8X-E board.
Is nobody at SuSE paying attention? The LiveCD is supposed to provide "good advertisement" for them, not bad!! It would be better to reduce the features but improve the hardware compatibility on the single CD.
Carlos
On May 16, 2004 03:39 pm, James Knott wrote:
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.
-- I took the Live CD to the neighbor who wanted to try SuSE... he has a Dell desktop. The bootup frozed at his PCMCIA device lookup (he has none) and
On Sunday 16 May 2004 19:33, Carlos F Lange wrote: that was that. He opted for Knoppix.
I've had that happen on an HP Pavilion 6630, a generic Celeron 400 chip, and my son's Dell Latitude D600 laptop. Knoppix worked fine on the laptop, I didn't have it with me to try on the other two. :( Mike
On Monday 17 May 2004 01:53, C Hamel wrote:
On Sunday 16 May 2004 19:33, Carlos F Lange wrote:
Same here. In my case it freezes right after making the selection for boot up, no matter what option is selected, without giving any error messages. My box is an Athlon XP 2800+ on an ASUS A7N8X-E board.
Is nobody at SuSE paying attention? The LiveCD is supposed to provide "good advertisement" for them, not bad!! It would be better to reduce the features but improve the hardware compatibility on the single CD.
Carlos
On May 16, 2004 03:39 pm, James Knott wrote:
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.
--
I took the Live CD to the neighbor who wanted to try SuSE... he has a Dell desktop. The bootup frozed at his PCMCIA device lookup (he has none) and that was that. He opted for Knoppix. -- ...CH Avoid doing business with 'The Link' ISP. SuSE Is All U Need Linux user# 313696 Linux box# 199365
-- Hi all .. Yes i pulled the latest Live CD image here as well got someone interested in Linux here and bingo no go gets to PCMCIA detection and freezes if i do " Alt F10" there is the tail of an oops but i can only get the last couple of lines every time . Running AMD Athlon XP2400+ Clocked to 2700+ but have tried standard as well same thing MoBo ASROCK K7S8X 512Mb pc3200 ram GeForceFX5200@128 Mb other machine is similar different Video card fx5600 . It's about time this was sorted out i was looking at upping to 9.1 from 9.0 cus i have had lots of problems with 9.0 but looks like i may well stick for some time yet say maybe 9.2 9.4 ish .. Pete . G6NJR Pete otherwise known as "Quinton 11" A Linux Only area Happy bug hunting M$ clan Pete,,,,, :-)
It does seem that perhaps the QA wasn't what it could have been on this one. It's certainly not what I've come to expect from SuSE. OTOH, they've had a lot going on over there in the past few months, and I've been happy with SuSE since 5.3. Personally, I'm willing to cut them some slack on this one. It can't be a good first impression for potential new customers who are trying out linux for the first time though. On Sun, May 16, 2004 at 05:39:11PM -0400, James Knott wrote:
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. [...]
On Sunday 16 May 2004 22:01, John Grant wrote:
It does seem that perhaps the QA wasn't what it could have been on this one. It's certainly not what I've come to expect from SuSE.
OTOH, they've had a lot going on over there in the past few months, and I've been happy with SuSE since 5.3. Personally, I'm willing to cut them some slack on this one. It can't be a good first impression for potential new customers who are trying out linux for the first time though.
On Sun, May 16, 2004 at 05:39:11PM -0400, James Knott wrote:
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.
[...]
They put out a bug fix release several days ago. If you go to the mirror sites now, you will see that LiveCD-9.1-01.iso is what is on the ftp servers. I have gotten it to work just fine on a couple of machines so far. I had to use "safe settings" on my Sony laptop, which simply turned off the advanced power management features, something I commonly have to do with this laptop. Andy Prough Austin, Texas
On Sun, May 16, 2004 at 10:35:30PM -0500, Andy Prough wrote:
On Sunday 16 May 2004 22:01, John Grant wrote:
It does seem that perhaps the QA wasn't what it could have been on this one. It's certainly not what I've come to expect from SuSE. ... They put out a bug fix release several days ago. If you go to the mirror sites now, you will see that LiveCD-9.1-01.iso is what is on the ftp servers. I have gotten it to work just fine on a couple of machines so far. I had to use "safe settings" on my Sony laptop, which simply turned off the advanced power management features, something I commonly have to do with this laptop.
That's the one I'm using.. I downloaded it Friday night. md5sum says: 9f4ed1bc6b3ee582bf593fde75d5db43 LiveCD-9.1-01.iso .. which is the same as what's on the 3 ftp mirrors I managed to get to a few moments ago. Sorry, I probably should have included that info in my previous post(s).
On Monday 17 May 2004 01:00 am, John Grant wrote:
On Sun, May 16, 2004 at 10:35:30PM -0500, Andy Prough wrote:
On Sunday 16 May 2004 22:01, John Grant wrote:
It does seem that perhaps the QA wasn't what it could have been on this one. It's certainly not what I've come to expect from SuSE.
...
They put out a bug fix release several days ago. If you go to the mirror sites now, you will see that LiveCD-9.1-01.iso is what is on the ftp servers. I have gotten it to work just fine on a couple of machines so far. I had to use "safe settings" on my Sony laptop, which simply turned off the advanced power management features, something I commonly have to do with this laptop.
That's the one I'm using.. I downloaded it Friday night.
md5sum says:
9f4ed1bc6b3ee582bf593fde75d5db43 LiveCD-9.1-01.iso
.. which is the same as what's on the 3 ftp mirrors I managed to get to a few moments ago.
Sorry, I probably should have included that info in my previous post(s). ===========
John, One thing I noticed in reading the Readme file was that this LiveCD needed lots of memory to work, at least 256mb. I know I tried the previous version on an old 500mhz Celeron that wouldn't work and will try this new one after downloading. It does have 256mb though, so I'll report back after trying it. The point I wanted to make though was the large ram requirement to use the 9.1 LiveCD. Sometimes the Readme files help sort out those pesky problems. ;o) Lee -- --- KMail v1.6.2 --- SuSE Linux Pro v9.0 --- Registered Linux User #225206 On any other day, that might seem strange...
On Monday 17 May 2004 09:39 am, BandiPat wrote:
On Monday 17 May 2004 01:00 am, John Grant wrote:
On Sun, May 16, 2004 at 10:35:30PM -0500, Andy Prough wrote:
On Sunday 16 May 2004 22:01, John Grant wrote:
It does seem that perhaps the QA wasn't what it could have been on this one. It's certainly not what I've come to expect from SuSE.
...
They put out a bug fix release several days ago. If you go to the mirror sites now, you will see that LiveCD-9.1-01.iso is what is on the ftp servers. I have gotten it to work just fine on a couple of machines so far. I had to use "safe settings" on my Sony laptop, which simply turned off the advanced power management features, something I commonly have to do with this laptop.
That's the one I'm using.. I downloaded it Friday night.
md5sum says:
9f4ed1bc6b3ee582bf593fde75d5db43 LiveCD-9.1-01.iso
.. which is the same as what's on the 3 ftp mirrors I managed to get to a few moments ago.
Sorry, I probably should have included that info in my previous post(s).
===========
John,
One thing I noticed in reading the Readme file was that this LiveCD needed lots of memory to work, at least 256mb. I know I tried the previous version on an old 500mhz Celeron that wouldn't work and will try this new one after downloading. It does have 256mb though, so I'll report back after trying it.
The point I wanted to make though was the large ram requirement to use the 9.1 LiveCD. Sometimes the Readme files help sort out those pesky problems. ;o)
Lee ===============
Ok, seems the new version of the LiveCD still won't work with the old Celeron Gateway! It does't even see the CD though, so I am not sure what is going on with it. Or it sees it, but treats it as a non-bootable CD and goes right to the regular Linux bootup. So at least for this machine, the new LiveCD still doesn't work. Lee -- --- KMail v1.6.2 --- SuSE Linux Pro v9.0 --- Registered Linux User #225206 On any other day, that might seem strange...
Ok, seems the new version of the LiveCD still won't work with the old Celeron Gateway! It does't even see the CD though, so I am not sure what is going on with it. Or it sees it, but treats it as a non-bootable CD and goes right to the regular Linux bootup. So at least for this machine, the new LiveCD still doesn't work.
Lee -- --- KMail v1.6.2 --- SuSE Linux Pro v9.0 --- Registered Linux User #225206 On any other day, that might seem strange...
Lee, I had the same problem, then I saw where Marshall Heartley posted a fix for making this iso into a bootable cd on SLE on May 5th: "You can try and burn it from the command line. Like so: cdrecord dev=0,0,0 speed=12 -eject -data (name of iso including the extension). Substitute for the correct device, speed and name of image file on your system. I did burn a Live CD and it works very well for me here." I tried his suggestion, and only had to put the name and location of the iso image (Desktop/LiveCD-9.1-01.iso for me) into his command line example - my laptop figured correctly that dev=0,0,0 was pointing to the built in burner. Anyway, I got a nice, bootable CD, and 9.1 certainly looks nice. Andy Prough
On Monday 17 May 2004 11:55 am, Andy Prough wrote:
Ok, seems the new version of the LiveCD still won't work with the old Celeron Gateway! It does't even see the CD though, so I am not sure what is going on with it. Or it sees it, but treats it as a non-bootable CD and goes right to the regular Linux bootup. So at least for this machine, the new LiveCD still doesn't work.
Lee =============== Lee,
I had the same problem, then I saw where Marshall Heartley posted a fix for making this iso into a bootable cd on SLE on May 5th:
"You can try and burn it from the command line. Like so: cdrecord dev=0,0,0 speed=12 -eject -data (name of iso including the extension). Substitute for the correct device, speed and name of image file on your system. I did burn a Live CD and it works very well for me here."
I tried his suggestion, and only had to put the name and location of the iso image (Desktop/LiveCD-9.1-01.iso for me) into his command line example - my laptop figured correctly that dev=0,0,0 was pointing to the built in burner. Anyway, I got a nice, bootable CD, and 9.1 certainly looks nice.
Andy Prough
Thanks Andy for the suggestion. Seems I was mistaken about the amount of ram in this system, as it only had 192mb where I thought it was 256mb. I did burn a disc from your & Marshall's instructions, but it seems, if there is not enough ram in the system, it won't run. Lee -- --- KMail v1.6.2 --- SuSE Linux Pro v9.0 --- Registered Linux User #225206 On any other day, that might seem strange...
On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 09:39:56AM -0400, BandiPat wrote:
One thing I noticed in reading the Readme file was that this LiveCD needed lots of memory to work, at least 256mb. I know I tried the previous version on an old 500mhz Celeron that wouldn't work and will try this new one after downloading. It does have 256mb though, so I'll report back after trying it.
That shouldn't be a problem on this system as it has 512M.
** Reply to message from Andy Prough
They put out a bug fix release several days ago. If you go to the mirror sites now, you will see that LiveCD-9.1-01.iso is what is on the ftp servers. I have gotten it to work just fine on a couple of machines so far. I had to use "safe settings" on my Sony laptop, which simply turned off the advanced power management features, something I commonly have to do with this laptop.
Andy Prough Austin, Texas
Well, I d/l the new and "improved" (?) 9.1 live CD and it still won't load on my 2.8Ghz Celeron desktop with 512 MB of RAM. Just as in my previous postings the pooter freezes when it comes to the bit about PCMCIA. Absolutely refuses to go any farther. I also tried Anders' suggestion to put "NOHOTPLUG=1" in the boot options. As before, it does allow the pooter to get past the PCMCIA lines but then, as before, it again won't proceed properly past the line that says: "linux login:" As before when you login as "linux" it says "Have a lot of fun" and then you're screwed. It gives you "linux@linux:~". When you type "startx" at that point it again gives you the error message: "No link to /var/X11R6/bin/X to the correct X server binary." And then there nothing you can do from that point. This is incredibly frustrating. Anyone else have an idea (besides using a different pooter -- that's not an option). Thx Gil
I booted it on my laptop yesterday. First time it hung. Turned off acpi
and it booted successfully with network support. I gave the CD to a
friend, and we'll see how he fares with it.
--
Jerry Feldman
Just a followup.. First, I got a chance to play a little more this afternoon & noticed upon closer inspection that it's not actually the aic7xxx driver that is causing the kernel panic. The actual stack dump shows aic79xx as the guilty party. There is a "FATAL:...." message that comes out just before the oops output and that -does- mention the aic7xxx driver that was throwing me off. Just after that though it says "loading aic79xx", and just after /that/ comes the oops. I also tried booting in safe mode. This mostly doesn't work for me either. It doesn't panic however, and it gets me to the desktop, which is good, I guess.. better anyway. :) When booting in safe mode I again get the message about a missing aic7xxx.ko, followed by "loading aic79xx". Whereas before I got the oops/panic however, now I get a couple promising messages about IRQs detected, then a couple minutes of rapidly scrolling text with all sorts of cryptic errors about SCSI-related stuff (to use the technical phrase), followed by the rest of the boot sequence and ultimately the desktop. Yay. Sort of. Unfortunately I can't see my SCSI drive at this point. An lsmod shows the aic79xx module loaded with a use count of 1, but an "fdisk -l" shows the only SCSI disk available as being the portable firewire drive I have attached to my soundblaster card (for backups). Neither the old Seagate HD nor the CDR drive I have attached to the built-in SCSI bus are accessible, or even visible. At this point I can get access to the SCSI drive(s) if I do a "rmmod -f aic79xx", followed by "insmod aic79xx". After that the drive appears in an "fdisk -l" with the proper partition info. I didn't want to risk actually mounting it at that point (it has the /home, /boot, and / dirs for my working 8.1 setup), but I did a dd as a read test, which seemed to work fine. So I'm guessing that something else in the boot process is messing up things for the aic79xx driver module. I noticed that the boot process attempts to load drivers for "sym53c8xx" and "aic7xxx" before getting to my "aic79xx". Can anyone tell me how to disable these from the boot prompt so I can see if either of those are the problem? Also, not being a big fan of writers cramp I didn't copy down the oops text. I did take a couple barely-legible pics of the oops/panic message and stack dump with my digital camera though. If anyone's interested just let me know where to send them. Finally, just to clarify, the live CD I'm using is one I burned from an ISO I downloaded from the link off www.suse.com Friday evening. I don't know if it makes a difference, but I thought I'd mention that just in case it's not the same as the one included in the 9.1 retail box. On Sun, May 16, 2004 at 10:00:02AM -0700, 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. ...
participants (11)
-
Andy Prough -
BandiPat -
C Hamel -
Carlos F Lange -
Claudiu Tomescu -
Gil Weber -
James Knott -
Jerry Feldman -
John Grant -
Mike McMullin -
peter Nikolic