I was just installing slack v12.2 on a Dell Inspiron 530 (a fairly recent one) and though the installation went quite well, the booting is proving problematic.

Before I describe, I have done a googlesearch on this PC and it is a problem child, I could already tell because there was a few live CDs it didn't like at all. There's bits of advice flaoting around the net about it, like always disabling DMA on it, changing its BIOS HD setting to RAID instead of IDE ... you get the picture ... weirdness.

Anyhow, the slack boot starts OK, and stops when the screen says "Booting processor 1/1 IP <somenumber>", then it does a restart.

And another, and another. And ten after about 6 restarts, it continued to login!

I honestly don;t expect anybody to undertsand what that's about. I shall continue to look at it ... I think number 1 culprit is the PC itself.

Weird is its middle name.

Hi,

What boot option(s) have you passed to the install kernel?
What about the discs? Check the md5sum for the install cd/dvd?

thanks for the reply onebuck.
At the moment, there are no options to the kernel, as it's the default lilo.conf that's generating the boot-up. the install CD's md5sum is perfect.
I'm goign to try and generate an initrd, but really if I do occasionally get to login, it would appear to be some sort of timing problem of a very slippery and unknowable nature.

Hi,

I would first diagnose by inhibiting the acpi/apm for the laptop during the install. Which kernel are you attempting to use for the install?

Hi,

I re-read your reply. Too early without my coffee.

If you've already done the install then which kernel are you attempting to use? I would still disable acpi/apm to make certain that your not having that as an issue.

don't worry onebuck, I appreciate your response.

I never specified a particular kernel, I guess then it will be the huge.s.

Of course I have been tweaking stuff, and, as often happens, the problem has got worse.

There were some Inspiron 530 specific posts on the internet, that recommended BIOS changes and other posts discrediting those changes. All part of the fun (it's only fun if you have the time for it of course.

With ref. to my original problem, I noticed that the "third time lucky" adage held, because the third time it reset, it would finally login.

Maybe I should have been happy with this, however I also noted that internet was really slow, and also saw that "acpi=off" was recommened as a fix for that too.

So I decided to append "acpi=off" and that's when things went downhill, fast. In retrospect, it seems awfully suspicious how often "acpi=off" is suggested as a fix for things as diverse as poor booting and slow internet!

Anyhow, what's the status now? failure when checking ata, revlaidation failing, qc timeout, EH complete failed to identify.

a total mess actually.

Will have to get rid of slackware, and try somethign else, I'm afraid. It's just this PC I think, or its BIOS.

Thanks anyway.

Hi,

Do a 'uname -a' from the cli and post the output.