Kernel Panic during Fedora 4 and Red Hat 9 Install
 

Hey guys.

I just got a FC4 DVD. When I boot from it for the purpose of installing, I get some stuff and then a "Kernel Panic" followed by a whole list of what seems to me like junk. The only words I was able to discern among what looks like a hex or memory dump is the word IRQ.

What to do?

Can you please help me?

Thanks.

:(

P.S: Reason I said "and Red Hat 9" in the subject line is that I got the same error back when I tried to install RH9.

Oh, and I am running an Intel Pentium 530 processor on Intel 915GAV motherboard, with 512 MB DDR 400 RAM and an 80 GB Seagate HDD with plenty of free space.

FC4 and RH9 might use a kernel that is too new for the Pentium I. The kernel is probably for i586 or i686, but the Pentium I can't use them. (I think) For that, I think you need a different distribution.

Thanks for replying - but my machine is a Pentium 4 machine. 530 is the new name in the numbering system recently introduced by Intel. Check out the Intel page on processor numbers.

Anyway, I got a solution from elsewhere.

When you get the error, at the boot prompt type mediacheck.

It will display an error.

Hit linux mediacheck and the install proceeds without problems.

This is crazy and meaningless, since there's no visible correlation between this procedure and the problem desired to be solved. But it gets solved anyway.

Theory is when something should work some way but it doesn't.
Practice is when something works but you donno how it works.
(Seen by me on Reader's Digest.)

You wrote:

>Anyway, I got a solution from elsewhere.
>
>When you get the error, at the boot prompt type mediacheck.
>
>It will display an error.
>
>Hit linux mediacheck and the install proceeds without problems.
>
>This is crazy and meaningless, since there's no visible correlation between this procedure and the problem desired to be solved. But it gets solved anyway.

This is, as you concede, completely bizarre, but I can assure you the same thing happens for me. If I hadn't read your post, I would never have thought to try this. I have a Fedora Core 4 disk for which I did a "mediacheck" on four different Gateway models, including a brand new E4300, and three of them said it was fine, and the fourth, a one-year-old E4100, got the kernel panic that the original poster described (in my transcript window, it seems that it had trouble reading the initrd and said something about

VFS: cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown block ...

I was starting to think it was a hardware problem with the E4100s (I tried it on two different ones), but your technique enabled the media check and the media checks out fine.

Alas, when I try to do an NFS install, it fails with a strange error. I'll post separately about that. I did a regular CD install after the mediacheck, and that worked all right.

Thanks for posting this weird but effective trick!

You're welcome! :)