[SOLVED] Various fatal exceptions at initial install across distributions

seam0nkey · 07-17-2014, 05:13 PM

I am trying to install a lightweight distribution onto a specific machine, and so far I've come up bottoms up. I've tried several distributions and with one exception (explained in a second), have come up with various fatal errors while trying to install. The machine in question is an HP all-in-one machine with a 32 bit Pentium processor, and 4 GB of ram

Distributions I have tried:
Lubuntu 14.04: when I install from my disk I get to the initial options menu wherein you can choose to install it or preview the OS etc. When I install to disk it spits out some gibberish followed by the error "Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt". When I try the OS with installation it spits out a seemingly infinite stream of gibberish.

MineOS Turnkey: (as you might of guessed I'm essentially looking for a good distribution to run a server off of, but will try anything at this point) This OS kinda functioned for me. In a similar fashion to Lubuntu this would get me to the menu. At this point if I try to boot it gives me a large number of errors pertaining to a null reference in the kernel. I was able to avoid this by disable APIC in the boot options, which allowed my to get through the config and to the actual OS. At this point I did try installing to disk which it did (as far as I can tell - there is data there), but on every subsequent boot crashed again. If at all possible this is my first choice of distribution.

CentOS: the last distribution I have tried. I cannot even get to the initial install menu where I am given the option to install to disk. Gives me "NTLDR not found" which I know is a windows thing, which only confuses me more.

Last thoughts: Full disclosure this will in theory be a dual boot setup. I did get GRUB installed (via MineOS I believe), in the MBR. There are several other partitions one of which includes Win 8.1. Any help would be appreciated, I would of course be willing to provide any information that could be of use.

suicidaleggroll · 07-17-2014, 05:45 PM

Have you disabled UEFI? I'm not sure if Win 8.1 will boot without it, but that could be why you're having so many problems.

seam0nkey · 07-17-2014, 06:30 PM

It's older than that and has been upgraded from win 7. It's on BIOS. No secure boot to worry about.

yancek · 07-17-2014, 07:59 PM

If I am reading your post correctly, you are getting the errors with Lubuntu from the installation medium? Did you do the usual md5checksum on the download? Posting some info on your hardware would be useful.

The CentOS installation medium is certainly not going to be looking for NTLDR and the most logical explanation for that is that it is not booting from the medium but the hard drive so I'm not sure what is happening if you have the boot priority set correctly.

You upgraded windows 7 to 8 and installed with MBR?

Quote:

Have you disabled UEFI? I'm not sure if Win 8.1 will boot without it

OEM installs of windows 8 almost always are uefi. It can be MBR. I've read a number of posts on Ubuntu/windows 8 problems at Ubuntu forums recently and my understanding from the posts by their moderators is that both systems need to be the same, both uefi or both mbr. Otherwise problems result. I don't use uefi myself so have nothing to test on.

syg00 · 07-17-2014, 08:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by seam0nkey

II was able to avoid this by disable APIC in the boot options, which allowed my to get through the config and to the actual OS. At this point I did try installing to disk which it did (as far as I can tell - there is data there), but on every subsequent boot crashed again. If at all possible this is my first choice of distribution.

Have you tried disabling APIC for the on-disk system ?. Will probably force you to one CPU/core. If it's a hiperthreaded chip, try turning that off in the BIOS first.

seam0nkey · 07-18-2014, 02:41 AM

Thanks for all the suggestions - I tried a bunch them in order and basically found out that APIC (and oddly on the second boot ACPI), was the reason that I was unable to boot. The way I did this was to add those parameters into the grub boot of MineOS - lo and behold I didn't crash. This allowed my to go through all the steps I needed to do etc. New question (and one probably easier to help me with), namely that while I am happy I was able to get here, the fix was temporary. In order to fully fix my problem I will need to edit the grub config file and my command line skills are not par. So how do I do that?(yes this is probably a far more noobish question.) Thanks for all the help, I know this is a new question so if this forums etiquette is to make a new topic I apologize.
EDIT: one more thing: to the best of my ability I could not find an option to turn off APIC in the BIOS - so unless I'm mistaken that option is out.
EDIT2: nevermind. got that one too. Marking as resolved.