[ale] Devil of a time with Devil-Linux

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Sat, 2006-03-04 at 16:14 -0500, Stephen Cristol wrote:
> On Mar 1, 2006, at 5:45 PM, Michael Hirsch wrote:
> > Have you checked that the CD is good?  Can you read it from another  
> > system?

> Michael,

> Thanks for the suggestion. I mounted the CD on the Mac that burned  
> it, but did not boot from it on another machine. Shortly after I  
> started working on this, they released devil-linux 1.2.9. I  
> downloaded that and went through the same sequence of events.

	I remember seeing some similar problems with Knoppix.  Turned out to be
DMA on the IDE controllers on older systems.  See if there is an option
to disable DMA and see if that helps.  That fixed my problems on those
problematical systems with KNOPPIX.

> At this point, the plot thickens. I tried installing CentOS 4.2 on  
> this box from a set of CDs that I have used for multiple successful  
> installs on other boxes. After asking a few questions about my  
> preferred language and keyboard, it presented a dialog telling me  
> that it could not find the CD (the one that it was running from).  
> This made me concerned that there was a more systemic problem with  
> this box, so I installed Red Hat 7.3--the last thing this box ran  
> before it spent time running Barbie games for my nieces. Red Hat 7.3  
> and, later, Red Hat 9 installed without incident. I then retried  
> CentOS 4.2. When it asked how I wanted to install it, I removed the  
> CD and mounted it on a different box. I was then able to complete a  
> net install via ftp.

	This is consistent with a DMA problem.  Older kernels didn't use it.
Newer ones can.  They break if it's enabled on older hardware that
didn't properly support it for CD's and even some drives.

> I'm now scratching my head. My guess is something in newer installers  
> doesn't like something about this machine. I'm hoping that if I can  
> narrow down when that happens in the evolution from Fedora Core 1 to  
> Fedora Core 4, I will have a useful clue. If I make progress with  
> this, I will post more.
> 
> Thanks to all who have offered suggestions!
> 
> S

	:

	Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
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