Redhat 9 - PCMCIA issues on asus aspire
 

Hi All,

I've tried to install redhat9 onto an Asus Aspire laptop ( Celeron 1.1Ghz, 256MB ram). The install appeared to go smoothly.

Having completed the install, the laptop restarted in the usual manor, grub came up, redhat sterted to load. When it got to the PCMCIA section it came up "status 0x0xxxxxxx" and gave some number and just hung.

I cannot get it past this stage .. has anyone else experienced this issue or have a suggestion for solving it ???

Pete

Wow, this kind of thing is far more prevalent than I would have thought. Anyway, you can't very well fix it if it's hung up. I have heard that what's really happening is not a "freeze" or a "hang", but just a very long timeout, have you waited 5-7 minutes before? I know, it's a long time, but hopefully it times out and you can get into redhat and stop pcmcia services from autoloading until you can correct the problem.

Thanks for the reply akaBeaVis, I have tried leaving the laptop for over half an hour and it still doesn't time out and move on to the next module.

It refuses to go any further hence the term "hang".

Is this a regular occurence with PCMCIA devices ???

Is there any way of disabling PCMCIA services at the time of install.

I've seen this hanging on pcmcia thing on more than one forum, though it has not happened on my machines.
I'm not so sure about disabling at installation, but I would think that you could boot from the installation cd or a "rescue floppy", at which time they should give you an opportunity to break out of the install routine, then you can mount your boot partition, and edit the init files.

did the kernel the installer used detect/enable your pcmcia ok?

If you go into interactive mode when booting (RedHat will give you 10 seconds or so to do that, and tell you which key you need to hit to switch to interactive mode) it will allow you to skip the loading of the pcmcia modules; that way you can get your machine booted up and you can go hunt for the problem.

Another way of moving on would be to manually tell the RedHat installer not to install pcmcia_cs -- it lets you choose which packages to install (or not) in the advanced mode. Try that - should allow you to boot and you can troubleshoot the problem later.

Hope this helps,

Tom