acpi error
 

Hi, I had an error on a very old box (probably about 15 years old). After choosing my kernel I get thisThe message is repeated several times and then the screen goes blank. The first time the error occurred I did get some more messages and I was then asked to enter CTRL-D to fall back to a command prompt.

I am running FC27 and kernel 4.18.19-100. Like I say the box is very old and was originally used as an XP box (this partition boots!).

A quick trawl around the net does not throw up much. When I get time over the weekend I'll boot from USB and grab that which isn't backed up. Time to finally bite the bullet and buy something new but if anyone has any suggestions on what to do next I do like to try and rescue lost causes.

TIA

Give us ouput fromfor a better idea what you're working with. I have several old 32bit and 64bit boxes with F27 giving no trouble. Xorg.0.log would also help us help you. You might try removing non-essential boot parameters from grub's kernel line, such as splash=silent, rhgb, quiet and/or resume=UUID=foobarbazbblah, and adding plymouth.enable=0 and/or acpi=off.

Hmmm... Old box, very new & forward thinking distro. We're 32 bit here, I take it?

Better give us some details on the box before I'll hazard a guess. You could be running into serious issues, because kernel (and programmers generally) have forgotten that stuff was ever made. You might even have the antique ISA bus and serial/parallel ports there?

A 2003 box might well have been designed earlier. ISA ( & serial/parallel ports) required hard coded specific I/O adresses (& interrupts) between 640K & 1MB and did not have PNP capability, so the software of the day lied to them and made them happy. Nobody's carrying that on now. ISA bus went out of the kernel a long time back. I had ISA bus until 2006, for one dodgy eprom programmer which used DOS. There was also PAE stuff to get over the 4GB of ram.

The box may not yet support acpi (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), which is relatively new in the kernel, but your bios may still only use the older apm (Advanced power management). According to wikipedia:
Similarly, Linux kernel 2.6 blacklisted any ACPI BIOS from before January 1, 2001.
and you are, of course using a even much newer version of the kernel.

thanks for all the suggestions. I am trying out a few live USBs to see what works. To rub salt in this particular wound though there was torrential rain yesterday and we didn't any power for best part of a day. That put the effort back a bit

Hmmm... usb might be painfully slow, especially if it's usb-1.x. USb-2.0 was a bit better, but in 2003, not a great deal faster. I had a major usb issue around then and seem to remember 10 MB/s as the throughput.

If there's a cd drive, why not install a vintage OS which will get you going? Slackware-9.0 was released in mid 2003. You can d/l it from this mirror at least
ftp://ftp.heanet.ie:/mirrors/slackwa...slackware-9.0/ THere's a file in isolinux/README.TXT which gives a mkisofs command to make a cd iso from it. You'll get an afternoon's fun out of it, and you'll have something that will handle the hardware - WHATEVER it is. It will also be an introduction to console mode. Probably your main task will be to run lspci, take a screenshot of it, and old timers like myself will have a laugh and tell you what you've got! There's all sorts of possible crazy issues I won't bore you with.

Make sure to set runlevel 3 in /etc/initdefault if you get it installed. Getting X to boot was a much trickier process then.