Dear All,


I am a newbie to linux and recently installed RHEL 6 on my
Dell Vostro V3700 having following configuration

6GB RAM (4+2 GB DDR3)
corei5 Processor 560M
500 GB HDD

The installation was successfull but when boot for the first time(and then consecutive) getting a error stack trace with some message in between as

Kernel Panic - not syncing: Fatal Exception
Pid:767, comm: modprobe Tainted G D------------------------ 2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64 #1


Dont know what to do i tried lot of googling but didn't got an answer for this

Hoping u guys can solve this.

Waiting for your reply...


Regards,
Arpit

Did this machine come with 6GB or did you add memory yourself? If the latter, try booting with just the original Dell memory installed.

Two additional things I can think of:
1 - verify your install media by running an md5sum on the CD and your downloaded image and verify them against the official sums.
2 - This is a x86_64 OS. This is probably a dumb question, but are you using a 64 bit capable system?

Thanks guys for replying

gezley, My laptop came with a 6GB Installed
and Noway2, i checked the media and its fine and yes i am using a 64-bit machine.

I just noticed that you are running RHEL 6. Given this, I assume you have a support contract with Red Hat. Have you contacted them directly?

Thanks guys

after googling since afternoon i managed to boot and login to the system. The solution
was to use a switch "acpi=off"(don't know exactly what it does).

Now struggling with my touchpad.

Thanks for your support

ACPI is a set of a set of power management functions and features. See this wikipedia link for info. Unfortunately, it is also something that appears to have been poorly implemented in terms of standardization and this causes a lot of trouble for the end user as you have just witnessed.

Does switching it off will affect working of the system....?

I doubt it for the most part. You may have issues with things like suspend to ram or hibernate or variable fan control. As far as operational stuff, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Your system specs, though, look like it is a fairly modern system so it kind of surprises me that ACPI would cause you problems.

Here is a link to a site on Linux and ACPI. I didn't review if fully, but it may help to explain what some of the functions (that you disabled) do.

I have a follow up question to this thread. Do you have the option to boot using different kernels? I ask because a kernel panic on boot often times indicates that there is a missing module. Re-reading your initial post, you indicated that it installed correctly, which I assume was running a copy of RHEL6 when it did so. Based upon my experience with other distributions, typically the initial install will use a kernel version with a lot of extra stuff compiled in because one never knows what hardware it will find. Part of the installation process is to load a "generic" kernel that doesn't have these modules. An initram image is then added to the boot process to bring the modules required for your particular hardware. If you don't have all the modules, a kernel panic will ensue. This is quite common, for example, in Slackware with EXT4 drives - one must use the huge kernel and make an appropriate initram image. In Slackwre, this is the user's responsibility. Undoubtedly Red Hat does the same thing, just automatically for you.

What I am getting at is if you can load a full / huge kernel and that works fine, then you may be able to re-make the correct module add-on for your system and restore the ACPI functionality.