[ale] Mandrake 8.1 failure

[Dennis Herrick]

I have a Gateway 300mhz with 2 hard drives . . . The master ide drive (with
XP) is a 3.2 gig Quantam, the slave drive (with Mandrake 8.1) is a 6.3 gig
Western Digital (I think). The CD Rom is an ide. Only two cards in the box,
a DiamondStealth PCI video and a 3 Com 509 ISA ethernet card. 128 meg RAM.

Lilo dual boot seems fine . . . I get a GUI lilo screen, and if I pick NT,
then XP loads just fine. If I pick Linux or failsafe, it starts just fine .
. . uncompresses OK and starts to boot kernel. Then I get a hex dump to the
screen, in the format of [<C01073e7>] or whatever numbers and this won't
stop.

It's difficult to actually SEE the messages, the scroll is fast and scroll
lock won't catch it. So, I got out my video camera and TAPED it. It's hard
to read and I can't make out details, but then I get to this:

PnP: PnP BIOS installation
PnP: PnP Version 1 (something??)
PnP BIOS: PnP ?????: request ???? OK (can't make out numbers)
PnP BIOS: PnP ?????: request ???? OK
PnP BIOS: PnP ?????: request ???? OK
PnP BIOS: PnP ?????: request ????
General Protection Fault

So I'm guessing this is the source of the hex dump . . .

In the computer bios, PnP is NOT set to PnP OS, but set to Use Setup. In the
setup, all the IRQ's are set to PnP/PCI/ISA instead of ISA only, and DMA's
are set to PCI/ISA instead of ISA Only.

I removed the 3Com card and the video card, used the built in video (The add
in card was there because I was told there are no liunx drivers for whatever
the built-in video is . . . this machine has run Mandrake 7.2 and 8.0 on the
2.5 gig drive when that was the only drive in the machine). Anyway, after
these were removed and there were NO cards in the machine, it still did the
same thing.

Can anyone point me in the right direction???

Since it is starting to boot, I'm assuming that lilo is OK, but I can sent
lilo.conf if it helps

(I should also add that I'm somewhat of a newbie at linux . . . )

Thanks.




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