hardware or software problem? (fct3)

[Don]

Paul,

Thanks for the information... after you confirmed that master/slave
configuration SHOULDN'T matter, and I continued to have problems, I decided
to check out a few things... And bugzilla people are suggesting I have
hardware (disk) problems, I decided to do a few things...

1 - I bought a brand new hard drive (WDC 120Gig)

2 - a new BIOS upgrade was available.... (though I didn't see anything in
the release notes that seemed relevant)

3 - I found the manual for the PC and read the section of "Adding an
additional hard disk".... blah blah blah "... the new hard disk MUST be
configured as MASTER, requiring the CD-ROM to be change to slave, and
reconnected to the "slave" connector on the ATA100 80 pin connector."

In hind sight, I should have done option 3 first.... that was free. (On the
other hand, the only reason I found it was because I came across it while
looking for option 2, and the only reason I was looking for a new BIOS was
because I was still having problems with a brand new drive.

Anyway.... after a day of removing the CD-ROM drive, changing the
connections, reinstalling various flavors of Redhat 9.0, Fedora Core Test 2,
Fedora Core Test 3 I managed to get slightly further....

But the install fails miserably with no warning/error messages during the
process. However, after the fact, on firstboot, the system does not show the
graphical boot up process..... and then hangs after the message about "swap
space....[OK]"

On another train of thought, I've seen a lot of discussion here about NVIDIA
this machine has an nvidia card with 64Meg... maybe that's why I'm having
problems.

Though oddly enough, the install itself manages to use it OK... hmmm, maybe
that's a VGA setting and I'm trying to use 1024x768.. maybe I should just
try a plain VGA setting and then change it after the fact.

Don



> -----Original Message-----
> From: fedora-test-list-admin at redhat.com
> [mailto:fedora-test-list-admin at redhat.com]On Behalf Of Paul Morgan
> Sent: Saturday, October 18, 2003 12:47 PM
> To: Fedora Test
> Subject: Re: hardware or software problem? (fct3)
>
>
> On Sat, 2003-10-18 at 02:11, Don Russell wrote:
> > When it boots up for "first boot", it doesn't go into the graphical
> > boot.... and after all the "starting...[OK]" messages a message:
> >
> > INIT: Id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
>
> try booting into runlevel 3, then run redhat-config-xfree86
>
> specific instructions in case your new to linux:
> at the grub bootloader, press an "e" on your os line, arrow down to the
> line starting with "kernel" and press "e" again (to edit). at the end of
> that line add " init 3", press enter, then press "b" (to boot).
> if it boots ok, then login as root and run redhat-config-xfree86
>
> you'll want to review /var/log/messages for relevant messages, too.
>
> > The second hard disk is "slave" with the cdrom is "master. The other
> > hard disk is master on the primary channel
>
> There is nothing necessarily wrong with this, but from a performance
> standpoint it is usually better to place fast devices such as hard
> drives as master while placing slower drives as slaves.
>
> > Have I done anything obviously stupid/silly? Should both hard disks be
> > on the same channel and leave the cd by itself?
>
> No. Main boot hard disk goes as primary master, next fastest disk (your
> secondary hard drive) should go as secondary master, first optical
> should go as secondary slave, and second optical should go as primary
> slave. (from a performance standpoint, that is).
>
> > Also, one error during install... I tried to create a boot diskette,
> > but it got an error when trying to write to the disk.... I tried two
> > different diskettes, then proceeded without a boot diskette.
>
> That's ok for now. You can always run "mkbootdisk" after you have a
> working system.
>
> HTH -paul
>
>
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