Re: help re Mandrake

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

Hi Neil..

> I purchased The Complete Linux Operating System 6.0 by Mandrake wih
> special versions of Partition Magic and Boot Magic to install on my
> Dell PC.

First off, I'm afraid you've bought what a lot of people consider to be
something of a lemon. The version of Linux you've got isn't really
Mandrake, and Mandrake won't support that version (which is probably why
they weren't all that helpful!!). It's a MacMillain thing, if I remember
rightly, and the number of people who've had problems with it is
staggering. 

> The Dell is a XPS600 with the following spec 256MB RAM
> 20GB Maxtor 92048D8 ATA HD partitioned as C D E F  Having followed
> the installation procedure as best I can for partitioning the disk
> to accept Linux, using both the Linux version of Partiation Magic and
> also using my own copy of the full Partition Magic I have the
> following problem.

Yep, all sounds fairly standard. I take it the chip is a PIII, not an
Athlon or something? And you don't have any extra 'goodies', SCSI
interface, etc?

> When booting to Linux I get the following messages on screen after which the
> system locks and I have to hard boot back to Windows.

Yes, that error message is *not* good ;)

Bad news: yep, it's hardware probably.. Good news: it probably isn't your
RAM.

I take it your machine is an ATX machine? I.e., you can make it sleep and
stuff like that. 'NMI' means non-maskable interrupt, which means some
hardware in your machine is generating a 'talk to me!!!' signal, and it's
top-priority. This could be the ATX power system - try disabling all power
management support in your BIOS, and see if it still occurs.

> "Uhhuh. NMI received. Dazed and confused, but trying to continue. You
> probably have a hardware problem with your RAM chips."
> "Partition check hda:hda1 hda2<hda5 hda6 hda7> hda3 UFS
> Cannot open root device 08:21
> Kernel panic: VFS:Unable to mount root fs on 08:21"

I don't know what other people think, but to me this looks like you might
have two problems!!! It *seems* to be stemming from the HD too - a HD
problem is something else that would cause the NMI. Is this system using
EIDE/UDMA-66 (very quick IDE drives?) That could possibly cause the
problem, especially if your IDE controller is not motherboard mounted.

After all that, bit technical in places (sorry!), sounds like primarily a
problem with your hard drive. Sounds like it's not been detected
correctly, or the controller is having problems. What you really need are
some boot floppies, to see if you can boot off those. Then, run something
like 'cat /proc/pci' and see what you've got in there, might be a 'known
criminal'!! Do you know which drives you installed linux on (i.e., hda6,
hda7?) I think it's trying to boot off the wrong drive, or something
cranky like that. 

Hope this helps,

Alex.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sheffield Linux User's Group - http://www.sheflug.co.uk
To unsubscribe from this list send mail to
- <sheflug-request [at] vuw.ac.nz> - with the word 
 "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. 

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.