Well for those who missed it: I have recently purchased a new board + cpu on ebay (board=mercury K7 so-and-so, cpu=AMD Duron 1.2 GHz, RAM=256MB DDR, CDRW=Buslink 52x). Now I have a bunch of Linux Distros and each and every one of them hang themselves up while booting setup. The last message I get is RAMDISK:Compressed image found in block 0. And that happens even if I use a live cd, such as Dyne:Bolic. How can I get that fixed? Someone told me it might have something to do with the software but I doupt it. Anyone help, please??

Greetings, P.

What is the first errors you get? If they scroll off the screen press and hold <shift> then press <page up>.

also, are these distros burned using cheap media? I've run into some problems with installation because the cd's I used were just way too cheap to be reliable.

TexasDevil:

Well I tried that out again with Agnula DeMuDi and Libranet Linux. Agnula shows me something like... calibrating APIC Timer..blabla..cpuspeed..etc, blah, then something with initramfs...... spurious 8259A irq 7... it isn't (no cpio magic); looks like initrd.. and then it stops there. When booting with # linux noapic it goes straight to "uncompressing linux... ok, booting kernel", then it stops booting.

Same thing with Libranet (stops while booting kernel) wether or not I do # linux noapic.

I borrowed RedHat Linux 8.0 from my bro in law but that doesen't work either (means: stops at bootup, this time at "RAMDISK: compressed image found in block 0"

by the way... should I have mentioned that my hard disk is a maxtor 40 Gig? I tried it with a different HD but still get the same problems.

timoioi:

I have actually ordered my distros online from Edmunds Enterprises. they offer distros for $0.99 + shipping. I don't have internet and have to go to the library. In the place I live in I can either get comcast and earthlink, maybe very overpriced dsl from my phone company. All of this way too expensive for me right now and dialup is wayy too slow. well maybe soon...

well I hope that's enough info.. I'd appreciate any input, no matter how far fetched it is.

PS: I said that all my distros stop at "RAMDISK etc, blahblah.." That's actually true for RedHat. Otherwise they all fail to boot on my new machine.

Trying using the "debug 3" option for the boot of the CD, see if you get more information.

use debug 3 as in "boot: linux debug 3" ?

Yes.

Could be a memory problem. Run memtest to check for it.

It sounds to me like you have a hardware problem on the motherboard. Start with basics... are all of the cards and memory-chips firmly seated in their sockets? Is the power-supply known-good and do you have a UPS box?

ok, I tried what yall said and none of that works. In both cases it went to uncompressing linux......., then stops. Then I figured that the ram settings might not be correct, so I changed the ram clock from auto to fixed 200 mhz - won't work. Then I tried 266 mhz - won't work. then I went back to Auto, then all of a sudden it doesen't get to boot anything and stops at loading ide/linux....... (or something like that), then stops. So... I'm starting to suspect that I might not have the right type of ram..? What do you think? Should I go and buy a new ram to see if that's the problem? But then... I don't wanna have to give out another 50 bucks for a ram, just to find out it might be something else... well I guess I have to.. geez. well thanks for everything folks!

just bumpin this up case anyone has another idea why my linuxes fail to work. I really don't wanna waste money on a new ram when something else turns out to make trouble. So... I'm happy about any input and/or advice.

Have you tried old-school HW debuggin: booting the HD from another PC, changing the RAM?

Is your cdrom new compared to the computer? This is the only thing left I can think of. I am wondering if the initial ram disk on the distribution doesn't have the module for your CDrom. The boot loader talks to the cdrom through bios calls, but once the kernel and the initrd is loaded into memory the kernel has to talk to the cdrom through its modules. Which if it wasn't in the initrd then the kernel would panic.

Can you try another CDROM?

You could try to use boot options like ide=nodma, acpi=off, pci=biosirq, noapic, nolapic, ...
Simply try whether they can do something. All those together made my old 300mhz celeron laptop working.

Max

Well.. I won the board+cpu together as 'new' on ebay. The CD-Rom drive is a ATAPI drive from Buslink and it's also new (or at least 5 months old) Otherwise I bought a 256MB 333 Ram for this board and I also got miself another 256MB 266 Ram and I tried installing Linux (Libranet) using the newer new one and it went fine untill it stops at freeing memory so-and-blah 96 Kb... , then after restarting it just behaves like before. The hard drive worked just fine on my old machine without complaining at all. As for trying a different cdrom I have another one but it's much older than the one that's on now. I'm definately going to try these boot options although I have already tried some of these such as noapic, nolapic, etc, so.. I have this strange feeling that this might not be the last you hear from me..