Bug 12511

Summary: RH won't boot up.
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: jctonnison
Component: liloAssignee: Michael K. Johnson <johnsonm>
Status: CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE QA Contact:
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 6.2CC: gcraig, hattenator+bugzilla
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2000-09-18 06:07:35 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description jctonnison 2000-06-19 15:18:05 UTC
I built a computer with the following hardware:

     Athlon 700 MHz
     Asus K7V mobo w/o audio
     128 Mb PC133 from Mushkin (run at 100 MHz)
     Diamond Viper V550 video card
     300 W Sparkle power supply
     50X Asus CD drive
     Western Digital 13.6 GB hard drive
     SoundBlaster Live!
     3COM/USR 2977 56K PCI modem


     I loaded RH6.2, and the installation went fine. I booted the 
computer, and about 1 sec after the lilo prompt the LILO crashed with
the following error message:

     Kernel panic: Attempted to kill the idle task!
     In swapper task - not syncing

The boot screen would then freeze and nothing else would happen.
I had a copy of Storm Linux 2000, Rain release. That OS installed and
ran on my machine, no problem.
     Next I called tech support. I received the following suggestions 
(none of which worked):

     boot from floppy;
     install the LILO boot record on the first sector of the boot
           partition;
     get a new installer disk from RH/support/errata:
           boot-20000407.img and update-disk-20000407.img

I also pulled the modem and sound card; UNDERclocked the CPU; did a
Custom (16M for \boot and 256M for Linux Swap) and Workstation install, 
and my machine did not boot. The last tech I spoke with ran out of ideas, 
and suggested I report this error to you.

     Thank you,
     James Tonnison (jctonnison)

Comment 1 gcraig 2000-08-25 03:41:58 UTC
I am observing a similar problem on somewhat the same hardware:

Athlon 700 MHz
Asus K7V w/ audio
128 Mb PC133 (100 MHz)
STB 2000 - Voodoo 3 AGP Video
52X Creative CD drive
Western Digital 20 GB hard drive
SoundBlaster Live!

Upon boot up of CD 1, after I select either text or graphical install,  my 
system completely hangs after the "Universal CD-Rom Drive" driver is 
initialized -- This is well before init takes me to multiuser mode in order to 
login. Only remedy at this point is a cold-reboot!

I'll try what is listed above, but in the mean time, any ideas? TIA

gcraig


Comment 2 Eric Hattemer 2000-09-18 06:07:31 UTC
same here a7v 950.  resets processor ID or something, then that doesn't work, 
so it explodes.  The last things I see are listed above (about killing an idle 
process).  I heard there's some kind of AMD or Asus patch or something, but I 
have no idea of where to get it.

Comment 3 Doug Ledford 2000-10-26 20:44:34 UTC
Current Red Hat kernels, and the errata kernel for 6.2, solve this problem by
not trying to disable the Intel serial number on AMD CPUs.