Hi,

I have been having a problem with mandrake 10.0 and 10.1 on a tyan trinity s1509s motherboard. To cut a long story short I have gone through the installation of both mdk 10.0 and 10.1 rc 1. It all completes (except for network connectivity for updates etc) then I reboot.

The computer boots up I get the lilo screen hit enter on linux entry goes to black screen with the checking BIOS in white text bit then computer just reboots itself.

I have never seen this before very strange. I have previously installed XP and other versions of mandrake with no problem. I have also tried monopix boot cd which works fine too.

Does anyone have any idea what on earth is wrong I'm stumped!!

:-(

tried noacpi in lilo?

Hi thanks for the reply,

I have tried nopic noacpi nolpic etc etc.

But still no luck

I've been searching the net to see if anyone else has trouble with mdk10.0/10.1rc1 kernel 2.6.8.1 I found one reference I think in the kernel mailing lists somewhere but I haven't been able to find it since.

I've just installed suse 9.1 personal and that works fine but only uses kernel 2.6.5. So i know the machine is fine it just won't boot with mandrake 10 and above. This is driving me nuts cause I can't even find anyone else with this problem. Either that or they just upgraded their hardware instead.

If you or anyone else has any ideas they would be much appreciated.

(It's a good job I didn't upgrade my firewall (same hardware) running mdk9.1 to mdk10.0 and above eh!)

Andy

I've had the same problem. Luckily I had another working distro installed, i mounted the newly installed system, chrooted and recompiled the sources. Worked like a charm. I suggest you get kernel 2.6.8.1-10mdk. If you used a filesystem other than ext3 on the root partition, you might end up booting the new compiled kernel with the just-installed initrd from your root device. In case the make install won't see the filesystem for the root correctly.

I can't believe that you are the only other person to have had this problem. I have re-compiled a kernel before but I can't remember the exact commands in sequence could you jot down the commands in sequence for me?

Could you also explain this bit for me in more detail I'm not exactly sure I understand what you mean.

Quote Start:
"If you used a filesystem other than ext3 on the root partition, you might end up booting the new compiled kernel with the just-installed initrd from your root device. In case the make install won't see the filesystem for the root correctly."
Quote End

So to recap... I can boot from the installation CD using rescue mode mount the filesystem on mnt, chroot to the /mnt directory and recompile from sources on the installation cds and of course then install it.

When you say you had this exact same problem. Do you mean you also have a AMD k6 II 500Mhz machine?

And lastly of course...... many thanks for this pointer. I was about to give up. Especially since suse 9.1 and knoppix 3.6 both work flawlessly on this machine.

Andy

LoL. I have an AMD K6-II+ @ 500 Mhz on a VIA MVP3 . So, it might be a hardware issue at last. Ok, on with the kernel... there are quite a few threads on the forum about compiling/recompiling a kernel...

1. Make sure you have the kernel-source package installed. Chrooting from a rescue mode should give you just enough power to do that.

2. cd /usr/src/linux

3. make menuconfig - this is the step where you customise your kernel to match your hardware (preferably). Leaving the default options would fill your kernel with a pile of crap (a.k.a drivers for hardware you'd never consider even buying). This took me as long as it took to actually compile the kernel. (read: a lot). It's best not to compile the experimental drivers (plus, it disables quite a few options). Make sure you compile your IDE/ATA-xxx drivers and the driver for the filesystem on the root in the kernel (not as a module). It's a good ideea compiling ext3/jfs/xfs/reiserfs all as built-in. Less headaches.

Don't hurry doing this. Wrong options may lead to an unbottable if not unusable kernel. The key-element: trial-error.

4. make

5. make modules_install - this will make sure the kernel finds all the drivers it needs after boot-up. (I was able to boot up a kernel with no modules but those built-in, but it's not so nice with no 3D, sound, net and some other stuff)


6. make install - this will create an initrd appropiate to your install. If it doesn't detect your root filesystem correctly, the initrd will fail and it will end with a Kernel panic: No root found. Please make sure to pass an int=... to the kernel (or something like this). In case this happens, youd' load the freshly compiled vmlinuz and the stock initrd that was installed with the distro. It's ugly, but you can boot up and make a new correct initrd.

make install will also make sure to install itself in /boot and update the bootloader configs accordingly. You might want to double-check them.

This was the crash-course in kernel compilation. Make sure you know your hardware (use Windows to help you out if necessary) before doing anything. Saves a lot of time and energy

The mandrake hardware database wrongly stipulates that my motherboard TYAN s1509S is a AMD64 board now that's bad it is old man.

It installs the smp kernel and that's what screws it (I think)

I recompiled the kernel with smp support disabled and now it boots ok. Trouble is the .config I using isn't ideal. Does anyone have a .config that would be more suitable for this motherboard.

There is no option in the installer that I know off to pick the kernel you want (trying to be too clever maybe?)

Do you know if there is an option under expert install cause I can't find it.


Thanks for the details on compiling the kernel they helped.


I now have a problem with starting kde if I do a startx kde starts gets to about 50% then locks up the whole machine. Arrgh!!!!


Andy

Not even the expert install lets you choose your kernel. As far as I know not too many Linux Distros let you choose your kernel. (because there should be like only one of them...).

With the lockup... hmmh.. try booting it again, wait for it lock up, wait a bit more after that (5-30 sec should be enough) then reset and look into the /var/log/syslog for error messages. Look at the timestamps of each entry so you'd be able to figure out wether the error you're seeing crashed your system. Another place to look for errors is /var/log/Xfree86-* logs (XFree or xorg). This might provide you some extra info.

Another option.. logon to a console, do a service dm stop, and then startx or startkde. Luckily, any of these should attempt to fire up KDE. Switch quickly (read "before the place where it should lock up") to the console you started it from. It should output a lot of messages. Luckily, an error would get displayed when it locks up.

Ok Cheers,

I'll have a look at that and see what I can find.
I might recompile the kernel again yet with a bit longer spent on the menuconfig process first before I compile.

But there again I might aswell download the community edition its out now :-( . Bet the problem is still there though :-(

Well, I have the cooker version of mandy installed right now (circa 10.1 rc2/community) and as I'm an NBL (natural born lazybone ). I'd rather spend a few hours on a kernel than get my nerves pushed to the limit after manually selecting the packages I want and still having the same problem . At least this way you upgrade most of your frequently used apps.

So you'd see why I'm saying this... I'm running a Mandrake cooker with a custom compiled 2.6.8.1-10mdk kernel (NVidia drivers up and running, plus support for LUFS a.k.a mounting ftps), KDE 3.3 (with no problems burning CDs as a normal user), Gnome 2.8, and a ton of Contribs. And I don't think I'll install 10.1 Official when it comes out. Why? NBL