I have tried installing Mandrake 10.1 from a dvd but after 7 hours (!) I gave up. I keep getting a message that says, "lost interrupt" when it is searching for the hard drives. What does that mean? I have no problems with SuSe; Kanotix or any of the others, except PCLinux0S, which does the same thing. I have 2 x 120 GB hard drives and two normal dvd drives. I disconncted all the usb devices and it still would not install. My graphics card is an ATI Radeon 9200 SE.I wonder if that might be casuing problems? I am loathe to buy a new graphics card until I know, so hope someone can help and thanks.

welcome to LQ!!!

=)


just curious: is your motherboard an Asrock K7S8X??

either way, try booting with the "linux noapic" option...

Hi and thanks for the reply. I have no idea what the motherboard is? So how do I find out? I have tried booting with the "linux noapic" option and the same thing happens. But only with Mandriva and PCLinuxOS. No other operating systems have this problem. I would really like to get this sorted as Mandriva (or Mandrake as it was then) was the first Linux OS I treid about 10 years ago. Thanks once again.

this is hardly scientific, but you could open your PC case and see if the board looks exactly like this:

http://www.asrock.com/product/product_k7s8x.htm

Quote:

I have tried booting with the "linux noapic" option and the same thing happens.

my bad... try with "linux noacpi" instead...

Yes, my motherboard is exactly like that and the same make. Does that make a difference? Thanks for your help.

i just figured it was that board because almost everyone i googled having the same issue as you was using that board... and the common workaround was to boot with the "linux noacpi" parameter...

OK I will try that and thanks. Otherwise it's a new motherboard I guess. Can you tell me what "lost interrupt" means when it is searching the hard drives? Thanks for all your help.

my best guess is that the kernel wasn't able to keep an interrupt open for the drive because (for some reason) it was being taken-over by the ACPI system...

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/I/IRQ.html

http://www.pchell.com/hardware/irqs.shtml

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/CEC/ACPI-MP.mspx

Thanks again. I'm not sure what I can do if the same thing happens even if I do "linux noacpi". Guess a new motherboard would solve it, but that seems a bit drastic

yeah, that would be way too drastic and unnecessary... this is probably a mandrake-specific kernel issue (PCLinuxOS is mandrake-based) which you just need to work-around, as you know the board does work well with linux cuz of those other distros you've successfully run on it...

I'll keep you posted as to progress. At the moment I am using Kanotix 2005-2 without any trouble, but want to try PCLinuxOS or Manrdiva as well, mainly because ffmpeg; mplayer; mencoder; konverter and transcode are in the packages. I've given up trying to install transcode on Kanotix due to the dependencies......

I tried "linux noacpi" and also, with PCLinuxOS "livecd noacpi" but still got the same results. It won't install. Someone suggested Ctrl-c when it sticks at the "loading cdrom modules for kernel 2.6" but that did nothing either. Any further ideas? Thanks once again.

Well, I've tried everything but still no luck. I've just given up again after well over an hour with nothing being installed. Seems it can't find the cd-rom drives, though it knows there are there. Any ideas please? Thanks.

hmmm... okay, instead of "noacpi", try with "pci=noacpi"...

also, maybe "linux noapic acpi=off" or even "linux failsafe"...

i'm not sure what else to tell you, buddy, i wish i could be more helpful...

=(

OK thanks for the advice. If nothing works, then I will have to try another motherboard. Oh, could it be the ATI Radeon 9200SE graphic card causing the problems?