Hi I got this laptop from a friend and was going fine then windows crashed.. of course so i decided to tryout Mandrake Move 9.0 to see if Mandrake would run before i wasted time installing... well Mandrake boots up fine then it gives me this huge error message:


Code: 8b 02 85 c7 74 f1 6a 00 52 e8 09 0e 00 00 5a 85 c0 59 74 e3

<0> Kernel panic" Aiee, killing interrupt handler!
In interrupt handler - not syncing


Can anyone help me out here? the same thing happens when i try to load another distro and live cd suse freezes..

on a side note, windows installer also freezes during install

I have no idea what the problem is... could it possibly be hardware?

try re-setting the bios to see if it helps...

if not, then i believe you probably will need to start troubleshooting your hardware...

=(

sounds like bad memory to me.... tough luck dude. :-(

damn... i already tried taking out the motherboard battery... to reset the cmos? does that reset the bios as well?

On an unrelated note... does anyone know some good Compaq Presario laptop sites? that deal with hardware troubleshooting?

lol, but seriously thanks for your help guys...

taking the battery out clears the cmos which in turn resets the bios...

so basically you already did all that...

you've come to the part in troubleshooting where you need to strip the system down and start testing a part at a time... if you have two memory modules, for example, remove one of them and test the system, if it still freezes, try with the other memory module, etc.. if it doesn't freeze, then you know it was a memory issue...

if you can find "known good" parts to test with, it would be excellent...

i don't know anything about linux but it seems to be may the CD that you are using have got crupped data for somehow. it can be caused by either while you are wringthing CD or when you are downloading the CD.. i suggest that try the SAME CD with an other machine and then see what happens and if it is boots up on there then i would say like the guy above me said that is a memory or bios problem then you need to do some troubleshooting (which is pain i know that) if it is not then i believe that CD if corrupted and try an other one live file system see if that will work......

well I dled Suse's live cd and it also gave me a similar problem... I'm proned to thinking that it's a memory issue... but thesrs only one bank of 256... the other parts seem to check out... everything works fine when i boot with a win 98 boot disk... maybe because the boot disk requires almost no ram? Also when I try to install win xp back it copies all the setup files in its boot mode but when it trys to switch to the setup prog... it freezes...

Does anyone know how I could maybe test the ram without removing it? or maybe a system boot check prog? anthing like that out there?

http://www.memtest.org/

http://www.memtest86.com/

hahaha sorry it took so long to get back with a reply... well I am running the mem test right now and it is comming up with over 12,000 errors already... well it seems as if thats the problem boys... thanks for all of yalls help! now I can get this baby back up and running hopefully! Thanks!

-Jason

CMOS = Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor
BIOS = Basic Input/Output System

CMOS is just the hardware that keeps the BIOS ticking - they're essentially the same thing.

that's not accurate...

the cmos only stores the parameters... it's volatile memory, meaning that it needs to have electricity runing to it all the time in order to store data... this is what the battery is for... you remove the battery, and the parameters are erased (but the bios remains exactly the same)...

the bios software itself resides on separate non-volatile memory (like a rom chip, or nowadays a flash chip), so that it won't erase when the battery is removed...