Bug 232753

Summary:	system hang in OS installation
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5	Reporter:	George <george.liu>
Component:	kernel	Assignee:	Alan Cox <alan>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Martin Jenner <mjenner>
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	5.0	CC:	alan, jarod
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	x86_64
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2008-01-08 21:37:17 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 George 2007-03-17 03:09:55 UTC

Description of problem:
When installing from CDROM (boot.iso), it hangs after the following message

Probe IDE interface ide0 ...

This system doesn't have ide HD, but does have S_ATA

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Fresh install OS from CDROM
2. Choose default (Enter)
3. wait for the message
  
Actual results:
System hangs, and installation won't continue

Expected results:
smooth installation

Additional info:

Comment 1 Alan Cox 2007-03-29 09:47:57 UTC

Can you tell me more about the hardware (vendor etc) and also whether it
proceeds further after about 2 minutes ?

Comment 2 George 2007-03-29 20:18:29 UTC

Hi Alan,

Thanks for looking into the bug. The HW is 
HP Pavilion Media Center a1610n Ath64 X2 4200+ Dual-Core 1GB Memory  SATA HD 250GB.

It doesn't proceeds further.

Comment 3 Alan Cox 2007-03-29 22:05:28 UTC

I'm not sure what is going on initially but can you see if any of the following
boot options have any effect

"acpi=off"
"ide0=noprobe"
"irqpoll"

That will help me understand what is going on

Comment 4 George 2007-04-04 15:25:51 UTC

The installation can continue by using "acpi=off" .

Also noticed one thing, nfs installation doesn't work, but ftp or http
installation works fine. 

Thank you.

Comment 7 Jarod Wilson 2007-09-12 15:18:47 UTC

George, can we have you try a few things?

1) if a newer BIOS exists for this system, please update your BIOS and see if
the problem persists

2) try installing the latest fedora rawhide, so we can determine if a fix may
already exist in the latest upstream kernel

Comment 8 Alan Cox 2008-01-08 21:36:51 UTC

Certain HP systems reused port 0x80 (allocated to the ISA debug port) for ACPI
control.  It's a somewhat bizarre and crazy thing to have done but they did it
and PC standards being convention and armwaving rather than documented make it
hard to say if its right or wrong.

The upshot however is such machines will not run Linux without acpi=off and the
various ACPI managed features are not usable in Linux. Fixing that for RHEL5
would be high risk, and given acpi=off works as a workaround I think we should
leave it at that.

Some of this is currently getting worked out upstream so hopefully future
products will handle it now we finally found out what is going on.