RedHat 9 gives errors when RedHat 8 worked fine - same hardware
 

Ok, this is frustrating, long, and very odd, here goes:

I have been using Red Hat for years. ON THIS MACHINE, I have installed 6.x, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.0 and 9.0 dual booting with Win98se.

Machine is P3 600Mhz, 256 MB RAM, Intel vc820 mobo, Maxtor 8GB and 13GB hard drives, AHA-2940 SCSI card for a tape drive.

Recently, I bought a 30GB Maxtor. I upgraded the mobo BIOS to play nice with the SCSI card. I installed Win2K on the first couple GB, Red Hat 9.0 on the next couple GB, and used the rest for storage space. Everything worked fine for several weeks.

--> fast forward to last weekend <--

When I had installed Red Hat 9.0, I did my first "install everything". Last weekend, I got tired of updating EVERYTHING through Ximian or up2date ... I was updating things I would never use. So I decided to reinstall.

I booted off a diskette and pointed the install at a partition with the three Shrike iso files on it, found them and started installing. Partitioning and package selection went fine and everything was cranking along fine ... then POW, near the end I got a "XXXXX package could not install, you have media errors or bad sectors" (or some error very similar). The "XXXX" package is different every time.

I tried reinstalling three or four times, each time with different partitioning, including blowing away the Win2K partition to use the whole thing for Linux and one time where I used just a 100MB /boot partition near the front of the disk with the "/" somewhere else on the disk. Same results.

--> The part that frosts me <--

Ok, what really bakes my noodle is that I returned the drive for an identical one thinking it was a bad drive. The replacement does the SAME EXACT thing ... right up until I install Red Hat 8.0 on it!! ... works perfectly! ...ughh.

So ... WHY would Red Hat 8.0 work fine, Win2K works fine, (these two points seem to indicate that my BIOS is not having problems reading the drive due to its 30 gig-ness) ... but Red Hat 9.0 barfs on install?!?!

BTW, one time after the install errored out with that "media error or bad sectors" junk, I tried to "rescue" the install and pick up where it left off. It seemed to work, but then X wouldn't work and reboots gave me a kernel panic.

Does ANYONE have a clue what is going on? Has anyone seen this problem? Could it be the new kernel doesn't like me? Is this too many questions?

<bump>

Wow ... two days and not even a nibble?

Can I ask, are folks not responding because you (like me) have NO IDEA what the problem is, or are we just mostly answering newbie-type questions here?

Either way is understandable, I cannot complain too loudly about free support right?

I would say no one knows... :(
 

I have RH9 and speak to lots of ppl who use it and none have hardware issues they all seem to have software issues.


This may be a silly question but you have checked the hardware list that RH9 is compaitible with your hardware?


At least I have bumped this message :D


Good luck

Medic6666

The only things I checked the compatability list for were my SCSI card and video card (geforce2). This hardware has been fine since 7.x (I know, I know <thunk> "RH9 is NEWER")

The RH9 install was even bombing out when I installed RH8 first, booted with a diskette, removed all files from the filesystems (leaving clean filesystems in case the RH9 install was barfing on setting up the filesystems), and then installed RH9 without reformatting any of the filesystems. .... same problem.

I FINALLY got RH9 installed by installing RH8 and then booting the RH9 install and telling it to upgrade.

I did this knowing that lots of people are having problems with it ... but I was almost FIVE DAYS without a Linux box darn it! I was getting twitchy.

Now I have a week or two to find the best SuSE server to install from and get my ducks in a row.

I had hardware problems with 9.0 as well, my pcmcia card that worked with 8.0 didn't work with 9.0, strange stuff.

I also had two weird problems with hardware on 9.0. On one server somehow the upgrade managed to change the boot order of my two hard drives freezing the boot process. The other problem was triggering segmentation faults on that server and another once the server booted. Increasing RAM from 192MB to 256MB seemed to cure this problem.

Hi obarney,

Hmmm... I'm having problems with RH9 too - Machine is an old dual PPro with a Maxtox IDE drive (+IDE cdrom and the usual other stuff).

RH8 worked absolutely fine, as does Win98se, win2000srv and FreeBSD. I haven't got the exact drive model no. but it's a 40Gb disk that's been jumpered to only show 32Gb so that the old motherboard understands it, but I don't think this makes any difference.

The problem I'm experiencing is DMA timeouts for hda (the Maxtor). RH9 installed fine with no problems, but upon the 1st reboot it hangs with the timeouts. I've only just noticed that booting from the install cd shows the same errors but installs ok. I obviously missed the errors before it jumped into install menu mode.

I've had IRQ confliction problems in the past (USB issues) when booting an SMP kernel on this m/c, but the uni-processor boot was fine. Not the situation in this case. I'd say the default kernel that comes with RH9 has a few "undocumented features", as M$ would call it, or bugs to the rest of us.

:confused:

Hello again,

Don't know if I've been of any help (probably not!), but I just turned off UDMA support for hda in the bios and now everything works fine. It's not the best solution - I'd sooner have UDMA on a m/c that's not exactly a speed freak.

Anyway, have fun.

J.