Problems with initial formatting.
 

A while back I started a topic on getting slack installed on a gigabyte board with an onboard primise raid chip. I was able to partition the raid, but was getting seg faults when trying to format it. At the time I thought it was just an issue with the raid chip/drivers/etc.

Yesterday/today i went ahead and put a single drive on IDE 0, and disabled the raid (ide 2 and ide 3, cdrom is on ide 1).

booted up, partitioned the new drive (150mb at the end for swap, the rest as standard linux).

went into setup, formatted the swap partition (seemed to go ok) started the format on the main partition and got:

Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 0000f0ff
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010: [<c0134e04>] Not tainted
EFlags: 00010207
eax: xxxxxxxx ebx: xxxxxxxx ecx: xxxxxxxx edx: xxxxxxxx
esi: xxxxxxxx edi: xxxxxxxx ebp: xxxxxxxx esp: xxxxxxxx
ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss:0018
Process kswapd (pid:4, stackpage=c1566000)
stack: xxxxx..... etc. etc. etc.
call trace: etc. etc. etc.
code: f7 43 18 06 00 00 00 74 33 68 07 00 00 00 0f ab 43 18 19 c0

(the x's are there because I didn't feel like typing out all that hex)

I've tried this a couple times and gotten different types of errors.. seg faults, etc. etc.

Has anyone else run into this type of thing?
Things that I've considered:
kernal doesn't like the processor.. AMD Athlon XP2000
there's a problem with the processor
there's a problem with the mb (ie, IDE bus problem)
problem with the memory
I'm just clueless

another interesting thing, is that using the ISO 8.1 cd I made.. it booted up fine the first time, after the setup failed I couldn't boot from the CD again till I booted with floppies and re-saved the fdisk info.
then it booted with the cd fine again... only to fail on the format, after which it wouldn't boot with the CD again.

any ideas?

You might try the boot option mem=nopentium and see if it has any effect or not. You can do search on that boot option here at LQ and pull up threads regarding it. Pay special attention I think to the posts from the hardware forum. I have no personal history myself because I am strictly Intel since the socket 7 days when they took there separate paths. Before that though, I thought AMD was a pretty good and priced excellent. I had several. But since the technology split everybody has been forced to make a choice one or the other.

I would also suggest running a good memory test program, like http://www.memtest86.com Just to rule out the possiblity of faulty RAM. Paging requests are memory related. Also, you stated that you had a 150 mbyte swap partition. I assume you ran mkswap and then swapon the partition or the setup program did it. You might try not using swap space at all. I would think you probably have more than enough real ram do the install without using any swap space. It can always be turned back on later to find out if it was creating a problem. In regard to hard disk options there is another boot option, I think it is ide=nodma. It disables the dma access on the IDE drives and I think would operate in just PIO mode 4.

Good luck.