Just a week ago I installed Debian for the first time (I guess I still have to work my way up to become a Newbie). When I downloaded the "stable" netinst image for sarge, it installed 2.4.27-3-386 for me. I got almost all of my HW (high-res graphics, alsa sound, camera, CD ROM with ide-scsi, ...) working after lots of googeling, but I had some annoying problems (Konqueror wouldn't mount my CD R/W drive, so I always had to do that manually (not from root - I got that), sound worked for everything except all CD players who could read the disk fine but wouldn't produce any sound) that several threads recommended upgrading to 2.6 against. So I tried, using synaptic to do just that. After running into an "APIC error on CPU0:60(60)" during boot of my new 2.6 kernel, I used noapic as a boot option, which got rid of the APIC problem. But now the boot of the 2.6 kernel got me into a strange situation: After some initial meaningful boot info, I was left with a constantly changing screen looking something like this:

[<8-digit hex>] <Description>+<2-gidit hex>/<3-digit hex>
... (repeated many times with different content)
handlers:
[<f88a0902>] (ide_intr+0x00/0x15d [ide_core])
[<f88a0902>] (ide_intr+0x00/0x15d [ide_core])
Disabling IRQ 11

The bottom four lines stay the same, the top of the screen is constantly updating FOR HOURS(!!) with changing but repeating information. There is also a line at the very bottom of the screen, that keeps changing rapidly, and faintly I can occasionally see some "irq 11: nobody cared" message in there. If I disable the IRQ 11 in the BIOS, that changes to IRQ 5, but otherwise all stays the same. No real error message, just a machine in some endless loop.

I get the identical behavior with 2.6.8-3-386, 2.6.8-3-686, 2.6.8-2-386, and 2.6.8-2-686 kernel images.

2.4.27-3-386 still boots fine.

Here are some machine parameters:
ASUS motherboard P4P800 SE with ATI Excalibur 3D Graphics Card in AGP slot. Two hard drives (one 70 GB used for Windows, one 250 GB used for Windows backup and debian), one CD read drive, one DVD read/write drive, one 3 1/2 inch floppy drive. Ethernet port, 8 USB ports and sound integrated on motherboard.
Processor: Intel Pentium 4, 2.8 GHz, 533 MHz FSB, 1MB L2 Cache.
Memory: 2 GB.

What am I doing wrong, and what can I do to debug that boot problem?

What more info do I need to provide for some merciful soul to help out?

Ekkehard

Easiest way to get 2.6 working in Debian stable imho is to install it with the 2.6 kernel from the start..
In order to do this you would use the linux26 command at the boot: prompt.
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstall...4173e73024396c

If you are running 2.4 and want to switch to 2.6 there are some dependancies you must install manually I forget what they are but I think yaird and udev are necssary.

If you haven't done much with your box yet I would suggest going the route of reinstall from scratch with the 2.6 kernel.. much easier.

That sounds like a real plan that I will carry out right away!

Thanks a bunch!!

Sounds to me like a IRQ conflict. Shouldn't happen with hardware of that age, but there's always the proverbial exception... Refer to your mobo manual how to assign fixed IRQ's to your hardware.

Did you enable DMA on your drives? On the sound problem: did you 'un-mute' sound in/for those cd-players? What does tell you about loaded modules for your sound chip (ADI AD1985 SoundMAX, according to the Asus website)

<edit: farslayer gave a very good tip, try that first indeed>

I agree - it looks like there is an IRQ conflict that neither M$ Windoze XP Pro has detected (which also ran fine on that box) nor the 2.4 kernel...

Needless to say, the mobo manual is completely reticent with respect to assigning IRQs to any of their integrated HW. Likely, they would have to get some retired folks back to even know what it means...

But since I decided to follow farslayer's suggestion and boot clean with linux26 I can't answer your modprobe question. After all, it SHOULD be the cleaner solution to go to 2.6 - right?

Problem is: While farslayer's idea was good, my execution was lousy :-( After I tried re-installing everything (and formatting the parition) I am back with the APIC error on CPU0:60(60) and a "irq 185: nobody cared" error message, followed by some "Disabling IRQ 185", even in my initial boot off the netinstall CD ROM (which worked fine with 2.4). Bloody newbie as I am, I don't know how to use the "noapic" option if I don't have access to the /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

Ekkehard

ugh on install you can use noapic nolapic linux26 I have had a couple occasions where I had to use all of those to get an install to complete (can you say laptop ? )

As for your irq message I dont have a clue what would be causing that..


You can boot knoppix and edit the grub menu to add acpi=off
http://kerneltrap.org/node/6042
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/tsaviran/misc.html

Another option might be to try the Etch netinstall.. Etch Netinstall Daily build This will give you a much newer 2.6 Kernel by default on install

Thanks a bunch folks - with all your combined help I finally got 2.6 installed.

"linux26 noapic nolapic" was remarkably consistent with what I got when I tried to update with synaptic - good additional info though. Also, Etch couldn't even mount the CD-ROM it just booted from. But all attempts showed these "IRQ xx: nobody cared!" and "Disabling IRQ xx" error messages somewhere and the "APIC error on CPU0" when omitting the noapic flag. Sounded like HW to me. So I checked for a newer BIOS version on ASUS' WEB site (probably should have done that much earlier). There was one - and it did the trick!

While the ASUS P4P800 SE BIOS version 1010.007 worked fine with XP and debian 2.4, debian 2.6 only worked with the 1011.001 version of the ASUS BIOS.

2.6 booted just fine now without any error messages and without the noapic and nolapic flags.

Hope that is helpful for somebody else who is using that board too - thanks again for all your help!!

Ekkehard

Glad you got it worked out
I hate those cryptic messages..