Kernel Panic on EVERY Bootup
 

I am a HUGE fan of Ubuntu and have converted every machine in my house to Ubuntu and not looked back. Last weekend, I updated every machine to Feisty and have been VERY impressed with the results. Last Friday I gave a coworker a Feisty CD and Monday afternoon he told me how he installed in on multiple machines and was THRILLED with results. Needless to say, I'm a big fan!

I have this IBM 600E (w/ 366Mhz CPU and 256MB of RAM) laptop [that just hangs around our house] and I had installed Ubuntu Dapper on there about 8 months ago without a hitch. It has been collecting dust, but I want to make it accessible for miscellaneous use. Recently I tried installing Xubuntu Edgy and kept getting a Kernel Panic error EVERY time it started to load. If I booted into Dapper that was installed on the hard disk, it worked fine.

Fast forward to last night, I downloaded Xubuntu Feisty, burned the ISO to CD and tried that CD in the 600E. The machine booted the Xubuntu CD fine, except for not loading the panels on the top and bottom. Be that as it may, I decided to install Xubuntu on the machine. Everything went fine and installed onto the hard drive. After the installation was complete, I shutdown the machine and did a cold boot. GRUB came up just fine and started to load Xubuntu. The Xubuntu splash screen came up, an error message about apm came up (which I ignored....I'll fix that later), then the splash screen came up again.. Then after about 5 minutes I realized something was wrong. The progress bar did not move and the lights on the laptop were flashing. These are the same lights that used to flash when the machine would give a kernel panic. I kept trying to reboot and kept getting the same result.

Sooooo, what's the deal. How can I trouble shoot this issue. I thought for a while it might have to do with a specific memory allocation not working properly (ie damaged RAM), but when Ubuntu used to boot off the hard drive it ran without a hitch. In an effort to get SOME form of success I tried installing Ubuntu Feisty on the 600E this morning. Once again I received the classic kernel panic message I received back when I tried installing Xubuntu Edgy.

Where do I go from here? Thanks!

**EDIT**

The more I try and read about this topic the more I suspect that I may have a memory chip that is going bad. There are 2 PC100 128MB chips in the machine and I believe one of them may be on its way out.

2 things:
1. it would be nice if you could post the error lines + perhaps the 5 before that
2. if you suspect the memory to be kicking the bucket, try memtest86

I'm sorry about the error codes. I am writing from work and I do not have the machine with me here. As for the current Xubuntu installation, the only error messages I will see are what flashes on screen prior to the Xubuntu splash (ie the apm message I mentioned previously).

I will try the memtest86. My gut feeling as of right now is a memory thing. The machine that these chips were pulled from started getting kernel panic messages on occassion too. DOH!! I should have known. :)

Well, the plot thickens. I did a memory test (ran it for about 4-6 hours) and the chips passed the test. Now I have NO IDEA what is happening. I checked Xubuntu Feisty's booting as close as I could (The splash screen blocks the view of the progress). I know that my kernel panic happens AFTER my PCMCIA wifi card is detected AND configured.

Any ideas???

OK here is the latest. When I load the Ubuntu Feisty CD this is these are the errors I receive

ACPI: BIOS age (1999) fails cutoff (2000) acpi=force is required to enable acpi
pnp: Unable to assign resources to device 00:0d
invalid compressed format (err=1)
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown block (104,1)


Any ideas??

now now

googleing for
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown block
gave me a log of good hits, even ones in this forum...

do some homework please...

For your information I DID do my homework. Nothing I found seemed to described my specific scenario. To add further weirdness to my problem, if I boot a Slax 5.1.8.1 or Ubuntu 6.06 CDs everything is great. My question is what in the world is so different from those CDs to *Ubuntu Edgy and Feisty that it would cause my system to not be able to boot (not even from the live CD)?

Ok, I installed Feisty with the Alternative CD and I still get a kernel panic. Then I made sure to boot without the splash so I can see what is happening. Well, just before the panic the screen scrolls errors for AC97 and then a bunch of other lines. Finally the kernel panic reads the following...

kernel panic - not syncing: fatal exception in interrupt

check your bios settings, make sure things like plug&play os is enabled and that all IRQ settings are on auto
perhaps also unplug the memory and plug it back in - there could be an issue on the contacts...

I finally just ended up installing Dapper on the machine because it worked without a flaw! I'm just curious what is fundamentally different about the boot sequence from Dapper to Edgy? I thought I remember that Ubuntu changed something about the boot sequence that is different. Whatever that difference is, it is crashing my Thinkpad but works with all of my newer machines.