Bug 38449

At what point does it fail?  Also, it would be very helpful if you could attach
the complete debug message.

Failure happens during install just prior to Figure 4-23 Installing Packages 
from Red Hat 7.1 x86 installation guide: there is an alert box indicating 
creation of file system and formatting, then a progress bar indicating transfer 
of install image. Originally, this progress bar would go about 2/3 of the way 
across the alloted space and then an alert box would appear saying: "An error 
occured during the transfer of the install image. You may be out of disk 
space." Yesterday when talking to support, the progress bar went the full left 
to right length, but the alert appeared anyway. It might be significant that 
there are no % numbers indicating the progress during this step.

If you press <Ctrl><Alt><F3> and <Ctrl><Alt><F4>, do you see any error messages
that might tell you what is happening?

The error messages that I saw were I/O ERRORS refering to SCSI ID5. This would 
be my CDROM device. Strangely, the CDROM drive works fine for loading 7.0 
(which is currently running on this box). Tech support thought it then be 
defective or soiled media, however, my boss brought the installation CDs home 
over the weekend and installed 7.1 on his home machine. He said nothing unusual 
happened during his install.

What kind of cdrom drive is it?

TOSHIBA MODEL: CD-ROM XM-5701 TA Rev:0557 ANSI SCSI revision:02

There is the possibility that the cd is damaged in one spot...the spot that
contains the scsi driver for the cdrom.  It could be that your boss' machine
doesn't have any scsi devices and thus doesn't see the problem.  This seems kind
of unlikely, but you never know.

Are you using automatic partitioning or Disk Druid?

Boss happens to be out of town until Friday, so that will have to wait: I'm not 
sure about his home system.

I installed using the automatic partitioning option.

Hey, try this...when you get to the initial bootup screen, type 'linux
ide=noprobe'.  Does this help?

That worked! Thanks!

Yeah, that has been a problem...the kernel tries to use dma transfers for faster
performance, but some devices just don't like dma.  We're assembling a list of
devices not to use DMA transfers on, and we'll add your cdrom to the list.  Can
you run the command 'cat /proc/ide/hdc/model' where 'hdc' is your cdrom device
name.  It may be hdb, hdd, etc.

I'm not sure I understand: when I run
'cat /proc/ide/hdc/model' (and the variations I'm up to 'hdh')
it returns 'No such file or directory.'

Oh...duh.  Nevermind, you have a SCSI cdrom drive, as you said earlier.  It
should be under something like /proc/scsi/scsi.  What does that say?

Host: Scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 05 Lun: 00
      Vendor: TOSHIBA Model: CD-ROM XM-5701TA Rev: 0557
      Type: CD-ROM                ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Host: Scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 06 Lun: 00
      Vendor: IBM Model: DDYS-T1835ON     Rev: S96H
      Type: Direct-Access         ANSI SCSI revision: 03

Ok.  Thanks.  I'm changing component to the kernel.

Arjan, this is another cdrom drive that has dma issues.  If there is something
else you want me to do with these besides assign them to you, please let me know.

This does not look like a DMA issue. Doug: does this ring a bell ?

Yeah, marginal media and a marginal CD drive.  The ide=nodma is a red herring,
it couldn't have impacted the install at all.  But, the install worked when it
was given, which is simple coincidence that it happened to work when that option
was given, and the real issue is that his CD drive will occasionally fail to
read the CD-ROM.  Most likely, his CD drive is borderline for being able to read
some CDs and his boss' CD drive isn't so borderline.  The CD itself is likely
also borderline about having a bad spot.  It will likely work almost all the
time on his boss' machine and fail a significant portion of the time on his
machine solely due to differences in how well different CD drives can read
marginal CD media.  Not a kernel bug, hardware/media issue.