I'm having a problem that is driving me crazy and making me broke. My old Athlon motherboard went, so I bought a shiny new AM2 cpu/motherboard combo, and 2 gigs of RAM to go with it. I installed Debian, but it was really unstable. I couldn't figure it out, so I decided to start from scratch - and Debian wouldn't go on. At various points in the install, I get kernel panics or kernel oopses. Meanwhile, my other (windows) partition works fine. I can boot there, do things there, no problems.

Thinking it was a problem with power, I bought a new power supply. No dice, same problem. Can anyone help me diagnose? I'm running out of money.

What version of Debian are you using? If you're using 3.1 (aka Sarge), then you're probably trying to install a 2.4.27 kernel, which might not have support for your new hardware.

Try downloading the Etch (soon to be version 4.0) installer, it uses a 2.6.17 kernel. If you have broadband, get the "netinstall" CD, it's only ~150MB and will grab everything off the web...

This is off of the latest debian liveCD, installing etch with I believe 2.6.17. When I actually got to a login prompt, I installed the latest AMD64 SMP kernel in testing, and it still ended up exploding on me. It doesn't always blow up right away, and it is inconsistent in the exact spot in which the system fails (though often copying files in the installer, formatting the drive, or using APT, hence the new hard drive and power supply)

Are you using an AMD64 liveCD? You can't just drop a 64-bit kernel into a 32-bit userspace....

I'm using an AMD64 liveCD, on a 64-bit system, and the problem happens whether or not the initial install goes through.

also, apt won't let you grab a 64-bit kernel if you install a 32-bit system.

Well, that's good.

Well, I'm a bit stumped. Just out of curiosity, do you have the same problem with the 32-bit install and then installing a multi-core kernel (SMP)?

I guess a last dumb question is you do have a dual core or hyperthreaded CPU, right?

I do have a dual core chip. I haven't tried 32-bit yet, but that's actually something to go for. Windows is 32-bit, so maybe that has something to do with it. This is a diagnostic, though - I want to replace whatever's broken.

I guess you could also check a regular AMD64 netinstall CD. Skip the whole LiveCD bit and go for the original Debian installer. Maybe it's a bug with the LiveCD installer???

Also, if I remember correctly the latest kernels no longer separate out SMP from the standard kernel. So you'd install linux-image-2.6.18-3-amd64 and it should have the multicore support in it...

Ah, terminology mixup. I'm using netinst, not LiveCD

Tried the i386 netinst image, no dice

What Motherboard/chipset are you using?

Abit KN9, running NF4 ultra

Memory is Crucial DDR2 @ 667, 2.2v. Don't know the timings.

I do not have a solution for YOUR motherboard. It does have an exotic chipset, and the way to go is through NVidia or Abit support perhaps. FYI my Debian Distros do not run on my AMD^ architecture. I love my AMD^'s, and choose other Distros. My success is limited. SuSE,...all of them, BLAG 60000, ARK 2007.1 Yoper 2.4.0-1 run exceptionally well.