Description of problem: I have a system that has been running RH 7.3 for a number of years and which I'm now trying to install FC4 on. The system uses a Tyan Thunder 2500 (S1867) mother board (ServerWorks OSB4 chip set) with the on board SCSI (53C1010) and network controller (Intel) turned off. The network controller because it seemed to be having problems and was replaced with a 3Com and the SCSI because it doesn't seem to work correctly with them 'new' Symbios driver. For storage, it has a Mylex DAC960 (model 1100) dual channel hardware RAID controller attached to 4 18G drives (2 per channel) for primary boot and a Symbios 53c896 dual channel SCSI controller with various drives/cdrom/DVD/tape hung off it. There is also a 3Com 3c905C-TX network card, NetMos Technology VScom 021H-EP2 2 port parallel adapter and an on board S3 Inc. 86c368 video controller. The problem is that the installation (text or GUI) hangs solid almost immediately after it asks about checking the CD, leaving a blank blue screen. Note that I have checked the CD's and have installed FC4 from these CD's on two other machines, so I don't think the problem is with the CD's. Note also that SUISE 9.1 & 9.2 don't seem to have this problem. I haven't installed them as I'm not interested in using them, but they do boot correctly and start the GUI or text install with the correct drivers loaded. I've tried various install parameters but haven't found any combination that helps. Screen #3 shows: ... load module set done loading parallel port driver... modules to insert parport parport_pc loaded parport form /mnt/runtime/modules/modules/modules.cgz loaded parport_pc from /mnt/runtime/modules/modules/modules.cgz inserted /tmp/parport.ko (end) Screen #4 shows: ... (Raid installed - MD etc) JFS nTxBlock = 8192 nTxLock = 65536 SGI XFS with ACL's, security attribures, large block numbers, no debugging enabled SGI XFS Quota Management Subsystem device mapper: 4.4.0-ioctl (2005-01-12) initialized: dm-devel (end) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): n/a How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot from FC4 CD #1 2. 3. Actual results: Hangs after asking to check CD. Note that CD has been checked. Expected results: Continue in the install Additional info:
Does booting with 'linux nofb' help?
I appologize for the delay, been out of town... That doesn't help. Stops in exactly the same place. Also tried, singlely and in various combinations with nofb: noapic and skipddc
Are the keyboard leds blinking when it hangs? Does the sysrq key still show output on tty4?
Keyboard led are off and do not blink. Sysrq key does nothing. Ctrl-Alt-Fn keys do nothing. Display is stuck on whatever tty was being displayed at the time. I'm this is a problem with the device mapper or the parallel port device driver. Note that immediately after "inserted /tmp/parport.ko" there should be "inserted /tmp/parport_pc.ko" and immediately after the "device-mapper" line there should be a number of parport information lines.
The only thing I can suggest is to try booting with acpi=off. If that doesn't fix it, it likely needs a newer boot kernel, and we lack the mechanism to respin an iso with an updated kernel, so if that doesn't work, you're stuck until fc5.
http://fedora.isphuset.no/ contains an unofficial Fedora 4.1, which may get you up and running, as it has a install kernel based on one of the errata kernels.