Struggling with Ubuntu · Mai 19, 19:07 von stargaming
I am (again, as some of you might know) struggling with a *nix install on my machine, trying Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) this time. To share my experiences on the one hand, and to receive some help on the other one, I will write down my progress and efforts so far.
First, you should note that I’m running a AMD Athlon 64 3000+. As far as I explored, all my hardware is ok and appropriate (I’m running Windows on it successfully). Memtest86+ passed without any errors (didn’t try it for a longer period of time but my Windows is running just fine for 2 or 3 days).
32 bit install
Okay, let’s start. I tried to install Ubuntu 7.04 i386 (right, 32 bit, I didn’t want to do without Flash and all this 32 bit pre-ancient stuff) and failed miserably. I got something like the following:
Int 14: CR2 f8000000 err 00000000 EIP c020c384 CS 00000000 flags 00010007
After investigating some time into Google searches, I could only come up with “Flash your BIOS”. Since I’m pretty uncomfortable with harming my computer (yes, a little bit of paranoia here), I’d like to keep this as a very last option. (And as I also read that for some people, this didn’t change anything, I’m not going to try it myself at the moment.)
Ah — if you want sources, just try a quick Google search, I’m refering to the top 10 results mostly.
My first thought was, Whoops! Perhaps, 32 bit does not work that good on amd64 at last? Our funny journey continues.
As a sidenote: I came to the selection screen. This worked all fine, but when I chose “Run or install Ubuntu”, it error’d.
For all those who keep suggesting a BIOS flash: a) My paranoia will drive me nuts if I even consider this one! b) Other people had no success with it. c) It was just some random note from the world wide web and has been documented to work just once. This is no good evidence to make it a general solution. c) Dated BIOS on an amd64? You’re kidding, aren’t you?
64 bit install
Downloaded Ubuntu 7.04 for amd64 machines, burned it to a disk, inserted it into my cdrom, hoping to see a goddamn linux finally, failed again:
Kernel alive
Kernel direct mapping tables up to 100000000 @ 8000-d000
PANIC: early exception rip ffffffff8035c819 error 0 cr2 ffff810040000000
Googled again with a bit more success now. There were several results, either cross-linking to the “Flash your BIOS” thread or suggesting some boot options.
Boot options
acpi=off noapic nolapic
mce=off acpi=off pci=conf1
noacpi=noapm
These were the three main suggestions ol’ mailing list archives gave me.
Note: There is a SuSE distribution installed on my machine. I didn’t install it myself, though, and it freezes occasionally. See below for details.
This matched a recommendation of the person who installed a linux version on this machine and told me he had some trouble with ACPI, too.
However, neither removing quiet nosplash nor adding one of the switches (I even tried to combine them all!) fixed the installation, regardless of the number of bits. I saw a nice text console that gave me lots of warnings like about misallocations on IRQ 0 or something like that (sorry, I could neither read, nor memorize nor scroll up (any hints how to scroll up in these 50% consoles?) fast enough) but it always stopped while * Loading hardware drivers. (If someone helps me to scroll up (no, it obviously isn’t PgUp/PgDown), I could supply additional information.)
Diving into BIOS
As of a hint of the previous maintainer, that pointed towards disabling ACPI, I started my (rather badly computer-translated BIOS (I’m german, as some may have noticed) ;)) BIOS setup. In the Energy (I’m retranslating them for easier comprehension) tab, there were two adequate entries:
ACPI Suspend Type [S1&S3]
ACPI APIC support [Deactivated]
No other mentions of ACPI. If you need further information, I’m happy to supply my BIOS’ version.
Help!
If you got any hints, feel free to use the comment form or write an email to stargaming (at) gmail (.) com. Thank you.
scroll up shift+bildauf/bildab — ChosenOne (“bildauf” means PgUp, “bildab” means PgDown)
32 bit alternate install
Just (one day later) tried Ubuntu 6.10’s 32 bit alternate version (for all those who aren’t comfortable with the normal installation). Guess what — failed again.
Unknown interrupt or fault at EIP 00000060 c0100231 00000230
Google yields a number of results this time, mostly pointing towards a broken disk. However, I won’t waste another blank CD except anyone will convince me that those alternative installs have a chance to fix my problems.
Retry alternatives.
Welcome again to our show. Our last episode terminated with “EPIC FAIL” (4chan-insider, sorry).
I’m writing the following report like one and a half month after it happened. I might mix some events up, be unable to read my handwritings whilst installation or not remember what actually happened, however, just keep in mind: It. Did. Not. Work. At all. (It not “just works”, geez!)
So, I retried the latest alternate disk and it even kinda worked. I tried pci=conf1, noacpi and noapic and all resulted in an interrupt 14. With acpi=off I could — attention now, dear audience — enter the textmode install. It threw some mysterious (apparently not too bad) exceptions about IRQ #11.
When in hardware initialization mode, these wonderful messages popped up:
ata: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (status 113 control 300 qc timeout)
failed to set xfermode
speed UDMA
failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 seconds
This procedure repeated about 6 times (connected with some CD acticity) and finally resulted in a textmode install. If you’re young and naive, you could think (or yell) now, “Oh, it worked! That’s wonderful, go on with the textmode and install Ubuntu. Finally.”
You failed. I went through the setup — ecstatic to the limit — and finally came through partitioning. “So, where will I put my Ubuntu now? The 120 Gb disk or the 80 Gb one?” But that’s not at all what the setup asked. It was “120 Gb hdd. Ok?!” No, damn, that was not okay at all!
That’s it again. I aborted the installation, unplugged the CD and rebooted Windows. “It just works.”
If you’re interested, I also had to switch the CD over to another drive because the slave one threw an Incorrect CD-ROM detected error. Just another whack of my weird, weird computer setup.
Why not another Debian?
Hello and welcome back. Due to some recent recommendations, I tried Sidux, another Debian derivate. And you can believe me or not, it worked. I started it up in normal mode (there are quite a few options for debugging erroneous machines — perhaps gonna try those later) with a nice KDE desktop and a console and internet access and all this stuff.
Unfortunately, the disk setup didn’t work, again. It just recognized this one hdd and I really don’t want to install it there.
I was unabled to find any dmesg, /var/log was all over populated with empty files (except some binary junk).
Plans
So, I got a few new plans and if you’d like to support me, you could tell me some advantages/disadvantages about them or even suggest other actions.
First, I will try the other boot options of Sidux. Probably their hardware diagnostics are good enough to get my machine to work.
If this all won’t work, I will perhaps try to unplug some hardware devices. I emphasize perhaps because, as I stated before, I really, really, really got some kind of technophobia. All this stuff is fine, I know how it works, theory is okay. But touching it? Uh — never! “Never touch a running system.”
Thank you for reading so far.
IT JUST WORKS
Wow. Sidux works when started in the ‘noapic’ mode. I can finally access all hdds and install it. End of the story.
Appendix A — Hardware details
- AMD Athlon™ 64 3000+, ACPI-PC
- HDDs (all connected as master IDE devices)
- Maxtor
- Samsung, Secondary ATA channel
- Samsung, Primary ATA channel
- two standard cd/dvd rom/ram devices
- nVidia GeForce 6600 GT
- nVidia nForce 4 Serial ATA Controller
- nVidia nForce Networking Controller
- some ACPI, DMA, ACPI, PCI stuff
