Suse 9.1 installation hangs
 

i purchase suse 9.1 pro shortly after having installed 8.2 on another computer. 8.2 i found 8.2 to be very easy to install and had no problems with the installations, even as far as getting my nvidia agp card working. however the same cannot be said for 9.1. I have found the installation extremely frustating. I am running 1.4 Ghz AMD with 512Mb with windows XP on a 15 Gb partition, leaving 23 Gb for Linux to be installed, the motherboard is EliteGroup K7SEM with video on board and I have a Lucent Winmodem installed. the mouse is optical with a ps/2adapter and a normal ps/2 keyboard. i have not tried to connect any other peripherals yet., there is also a cd writer and dvd drive. when you put the dvd-1 into the drive it will boot up and go to the installation screen. switching to verbose mode it gets to the point where the installation program is started but then the computer does not go to detect the hardware. i have tried all different options, such as disableapic, noapic acpi=off, apm=off and yet it still goes no further. i have the floppy disk enabled in bios and everything else seems ok. after 3 days of frustration i got out my 8.2 installations disks and tried to install this onto the computer. it worked first time without any problems(ok winmodem is not working but it installed). having managed to install 8.2 i then went into yast and tried to upgrade cvia the control centre. surprise i were able to install 9.1 onto 8.2.. i continued to use 9.1 for the rest of the day and it was ok. i logged out and it would not boot up and when it did boot up there were various lock ups, hangings of the cd drive, the mouse would stop working and once the screen blanked out. I reinstalled 8.2 and then logged in as root and checked my disks to see if there was any defect. all disks check out ok, going into the support databse does not reveal any clues, the support from suse is very slow and i even got to the point where i tried to correct the mbr and just have windows xp but this killed my pc altogether. so 8.2 needed to be re-installed... any clues or should i reformat and go to windows 2000 and forget linux until they it is more stable....ARGHHHHH:mad: if anyone can help overcome this problem it would be appreciated

well, since u have purchased it, why dont u ask for support from SUSE itself ??

anyway, if u really hate it, and are planning to throw away the pack, tell me - if the price is reasonable, i'll buy it!!

Well, I do not think it's really SuSE related. The 2.6.x kernel has new drivers . When you take a look on different forums,
it seems to me that the most problems with SuSE 9.1 are related to SiS, VIA and nVidia Chipsets (so basiaclly all
for the AMD Processors.). So it seems that the provided drivers for those Chipsets for AMD are not OK.
I *think* (so not 100% sure) that the problems you experience are Chipset related.

First update your BIOS.

You may also play with some settings in your BIOS.

Try to boot with

pci=noapic ide=nodma
and if that does not work then with
pci=bios ide=nodma

If you suceed to install SuSE 9.1 then I suggest you go to 2.6.7-rc2 kernel.
You may also update the drivers for your chipset.

Ok tried many things and finally got the installation happening, but it was a long effort to get it up and running. the solution was to use "SAFE INSTALLATION" with hwprobe=-pci. and pci=bios. in the interim i have tried other distros (fedora, debian and mandrake) and they installed no problems. thanks to all who have provided helpful hints to get up and running