Is booting to the CD causing the register dump, or is the first boot on Debian without the CD causing the dump? In either case, there are several things you can do to correct that.

1) Burn sssssssssssllllllllllllllllooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwww. Set you burner to cap its speed at 4X. It will take as long as 30 minutes to burn, but getting a good copy is worth it.

2) Check your architecture. If you're trying to install arch on an amd64, it might panic that way, or just throw an error.

3) There is no build in check tool for Debian, but you can greatly help your self by checking the md5sum for the download. On linux, you can just give the command If you're using mac or windows to download and burn, you'll probably need a 3rd party piece of freeware to calculate md5sums, although I wouldn't be at all surprised if mac with its BSD base had md5sum built in.

Compare the result you got to the listed md5sums, found http://ftp.ie.debian.org/debian/dist...n3.1r5/Release (for sarge 3.15) or http://ftp.ie.debian.org/debian/dists/etch/ (dig for the file named Release for your architecture.

Yes, that is Sarge. You answered your own question with the next few lines. Sarge is closing in on being 2 years old. Knoppix and Ubuntu are based on Debian unstable, which is only a few months old, and Suse and Fedora are also around 6 months old. Even usuing the newest kernel that comes with Sarge, 2.6.8, that is obviosuly as old as Sarge itself, some 2 or so years. Releases from the past 6 months have kernels from 6 months ago, which tends to be 2.6.18, which is also what ships in Etch. There is much more recent hardware support in the kernels from 2.6.8 through 2.6.18. Would you expect Windows 2000 to support a NIC released in 2003 without drivers? Hell no you wouldn't, so why would you expect linux to support hardware that wasn't even released when that particular distro was? As we mentioned on page 1, Sarge is NOT a desktop distro, particularly not at present, when it is so old. Etch will detect most new hardware, although a brand new, fresh off the presses MOBO with new cards won't be supported even by etch. Etch is very likely to support your card. To be certain, google to check when that particular card had its support built directly into the kernel. As long as it was 2.6.18 or earlier, Etch will support it just fine.

If the netinstall didn't work, it is unlikely the full install disk will work either. That suggests even more strongly what I wrote above, it isn't the info on the CD itself, it is something going wrong on the burn, or you're grabbing the wrong architecture.

Peace,
JimBass

Actually I seem to remember one. If you can get as far as the interface, press ESC to get to the installer menu and look near the bottom for "check integrity of cdrom" or something similar.

OK, I admitt it. I got caught with my pants down. The one time I'm too much in a hurry to check the md5sums they bite me! I've never had bad md5sums before. I did this time with both the business card and netinst images.

But I have downloaded and burned again and this time the md5sums match. Both the business card and netinst images register dump. Here is the image for the business card:

http://www.heintze.com/tmp/regdump.html

I'm still downloading the dvds. I hope they don't register dump on me. Someplace the help for the CD they said they were interested if it did not boot for me. I guess I should post this else where. Where do I post register dumps?

Siegfried

That looks like a problem with incompatible hardware, although I have no experience in interpreting core dumps. Please tell us as much as you can about your motherboard - manufacturer, model, chipset, etc.

I have a very cheap motherboard ($40 US dollars new), that always throws a kernel panic. Sometimes it throws after 20 seconds, sometimes 2 hours, but it simply won't run linux. I've tried 8 different distros, and swapped every piece of hardware including processors, so I am very confident that the Mobo is the issue in my case, and possibly yours as well.

In regards to the DVDs, I doubt very much they will make any difference, but as long as you have already started the download, you may as well let it go. Once the entire first DVD is downloaded/bittorrented, I suggest burning it and trying it out, to see if it can get into the install process.

Peace,
JimBass

http://www.google.com/search?q=pcibios_sort+init+kernel
1st link:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-kerne.../msg00183.html
There is a fix at the end but you may dig in google resultf or a cleaner workaround

JimBass: But it works fine when I run VMWare server from windows!

I bought this from PCClub two years ago. Here are the details from my receipt:
CPU, INTEL p4 540J 800 3.26 1mb 755.
Mother board: 915P S775 ATX PC-E MSI (brand) 915PNE K0410058070.
HDD: 150G 7200RPM 8MB STA WD.

Will this info help the debian developer eventually correct this problem? I hope so.

NK5000: Thanks, I try this (I cannot do this presently -- I'm in the middle of something else):

"Searching on the web suggested adding 'pci=nosort' to the boot line
(people had similar problems with Fedora and SuSE).
This does indeed work for me, however, I still think something needs
fixing within the kernel."

Thanks,
Siegfried

>>"Searching on the web suggested adding 'pci=nosort' to the boot line
(people had similar problems with Fedora and SuSE).
This does indeed work for me, however, I still think something needs
fixing within the kernel."<<

Have you filed a bug report? It looks like a motherboard issue. It's not too likely that the kernel developers will want to start tracking individual motherboards, but there might be some generic check that can be made during PCI discovery.

Hmm...i usually use the business card cd, it's only 37 MB:

Official businesscard images for the stable release
http://www.us.debian.org/CD/netinst/

boot: expert (Enter)

it will give you a choice of:

Stable
Testing
Unstable

Hmmm... good idea. However, I can install debian etch quite nicely if I boot windows first, run VMWare, and then install debian etch on a virtual machine. Does not this prove the burning process and my copy of the image are good?

I may try a different burner just the same.
Thanks,

Siegfried

Oh shucks. Using a different burner did help either. Etch netinst boots fine on my other computers tho'. I wonder if there is any point in trying unstable.