Kernel Panic: I'm striking out here
 

I have been rebuilding my workstation this weekend for a dual boot WinME/Slackware 8.1 box using the following partition scheme:

/WinMe 6GB c:\
/root 5GB
swap 128MB
/home 10GB
/tmp 1GB
/usr 4GB
/var 3GB

There will be a FAT32 partition after that for all my data.

Problem occured trying to boot the CD. I went into the BIOS and set it to boot floppy, CD and hard drive. Boot never sees the CD... so I went back in and made the CD the only boot device, rebooted and my pc says that the CD is invalid.

I have Slackware CD I burned and one I got from Edmund's Discount Linux CD's... tried both of them... same result. I also took them to another box I am setting up for a server and tried them there. The server box will boot on both CD's but on both CD's install of Slackware hangs on a Kernal Panic error.

My workstation is a Dell 4100 which won't boot the Slackware CD's. The server which boots them but with a kernel panic error is an Athlon XP 1800 box.

Any suggestions on how to get around these problems would be appreciated.

On the first machine (Dell) the problem is known as a BIOS issue with the boot format or timing issues mounting the CD and the best workaround is probably to use Smart Boot Manager. http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/ Load onto a floppy disk and boot it. The menu should then allow you to boot the CD.

As for the 2nd machine, it may be some new hardware causing a problem. You might want to post some of the messages just prior to the panic. If the message just before the panis states something about freeing memory, then I think the kernel completed but could not run init from the CD. Might be a CD problem or hardware after the kernel probes are completed.

thanks...

That seems to work on another Dell 4100 that wouldn't boot the Slackware install cd.

Kernal Panic
 

Ok now on Athlon XP1800 box... booting from the Slackware CD just stops after freeing unused kernel memory: 228k freed. It either hangs there or I get a Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 00010f00
printing eip
c01405ea

This occurs during the start of kswapd.


When I boot with a Slackware boot disk... I get the following...

Initializing CPU#0
Detected 1535.233 MHz processor
Console: colour VGA+ 80x25
Calibrating delay loop... 3060.53 BogoMIPS
Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address e030e69c
printing eip:
e030e69c
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010:[<e030e69c>] not tainted
EFLAGS: 00010286
eax: 00000011 ebx: 00000000 ecx:

Any suggestions?

The specs on this box are...

AMD Athlon XP1800
Shuttle AK32 Motherboard
256MB of RAM
Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 PCI Video card
3Com nic
US Robotics 56K Modem
Quantum 40GB
Western Digital 20GB

I have a working Win98SE on this box already. All hardware works fine in Win98SE except for the video card is a little slow but that is to be expected with a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 for a video card on this box.

That card should work fine in Linux for CLI. I plan to run Apache, PHP, MySQL, DJBDNS, qMail and ProFTPD for a web hosting business.

This problem is not just in Slackware...

I get a kernel panic when trying to install Red Hat too... same error after kswapd...

In Debian too... I get ...
Kernel panic: Attempted to kill the idle task!
In swapper task - not syncing

Any ideas?

If all of them are having problems on the same machine, then highly consider hardware as the problem. Run a good memory tester like memtest, http://www.memtest86.com

And if your overclocking then reset everything to default before the install.

You need more swap space if you have 256 RAM and only 128MB swap. Your swap should be about 500MB.

Running Linux 4th edition: The size of your swap partition (should you elect to use one) depends on how much virtual RAM you require. A rule of thumb is to use a swap partition that measures twice the space of your physical RAM. ...if you have a great deal of physical RAM you may not wish to use swap space at all.

At any rate, it couldn't hurt to increase the size of your swap space and try again.

I am not overclocking...

These errors are occuring at bootup of Slackware 8.1 CD and Red Hat 7.3 CD.

How can you increase the SWAP used while booting up on these CD's? I have not got to the partitioning phase yet.

They also occur when I boot the Slackware 8.1 boot disk which I created when I sucessfully installed Slackware 8.1 on my other workstation still have some config to do on that one but it is working.

Will give the memtest a try Excalibur...

Oh the last thing I tried last night was installing OpenBSD... using a OpenBSD boot disk it sucessfully loaded the kernel to the point it was ready to install OpenBSD where in Slackware 8.1 and Red Hat it is hanging before it completes loading the Linux kernels contained on the CD's and boot floppy.

Have a look at the drives and check that the jumpers are _not_ set to cable select, as your having problems with both slack and redhat this points to a hardware issue.

Ok I have tried memtest... no errors.

My hard drives were set to cable select... they are now master/slave... but that didn't resolve the problem. Booting Slackware still hangs.

There is a boot paramater that you might try. Boot the CD and at the boot prompt: option just enter ide=nodma if I recall correctly. I have also seen suggested using "bare.i ide=nodma" together at the boot prompt without the quotes. The spec on the motherboard states it uses a via KT266A chipset. I wouldn't think there would be any problems with the 2.4.18 kernel. However, they have enabled DMA modes now in the default kernels. I suppose it could be causing some problems. This boot paramater disables the dma mode.

Kernel Panic
 

Using bare.i ide=nodma seems to have changed something but now it ends in

printing eip:
c011a0e2
.
.
.
<0>Kernel panic: Aiee, killing interupt handler!
In Interrupt handler - not syncing

Is there anything else I can try?

I can't see what is above printing eip.

Thanks...

Ok I just noticed that there was a bios upgrade for my Shuttle AK31V3... I applied that and now the error has changed.

I see the following on the screen...

ide1: BM-DMA1 at 0xd808-0xd80f, Bios setting: hdc:pio, hdd:DMA
hda: WDC WD 205AA, ATA Disk drive
hdb: Quantum FireballP AS40.0, ATA Disk drive
invalid operand: 0000
.
.
.
<0> Kernel panic: Aiee, killing interrupt handler!
In interrupt handler - not syncing.

It is not much different... but a little...