Hello, After having gotten through the installation up to the point when the disk is to be formatted, we get this pop-up window: Formatting / filesystem... Soon afterwards, the system crashes with the following text, shown between the lines of "===="s, displayed on the screen. Details of our configuration follow this text. (I have included some typical "\" continuation formatting in order to avoid ugly line wrapping.) The problem appears to have occured in the mke2fs process, but you'll see that in the text below. =========================================================================== Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at \ virtual address 00000000 current->tss.cr3 = 1fe5f000, %cr3 = 1fe5f000 *pde = 00000000 Oops: 0002 CPU: 0 EIP: 0010:[<c011f665] EFLAGS: 00010286 eax: 0000003d ebx: d9e76e00 ecx: 00000000 edx: dfec8000 esi: dfed1740 edi: 00000286 epb: 00000009 esp: df427c48 ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018 Process mke2fs (pid: 38, process nr: 12, stackpage=df427000) Stack: d9e76ef0 c067e0b8 d9e76e4c d9e0afb0 c0125729 dfed1740 d9e76e00 \ d9376e00 d9e76ef0 c012647b d9e76e00 d9e76e00 c067e0b8 000007fa 00000005 \ 00000301 c011b432 c067e0b8 0000000f 00000006 c01202ca 00000006 00000005 \ 00000001 Call Trace: [<c0125729>] [<c012647b>] [<c011b432>] [<c01202ca>] \ [<c01203e8>] [<c0120b8b>] [<c012637d>] [<c01251d5>] [<c012537e>] [<c01280e7>] [<c01cc84e>] \ [<c016e135>] [<c0185073>] [<c0185684>] \ [<c0124f1f>] [<c013a5e0>] [<c018cb5b>] [<c018c8ef>] [<c018d255>] \ [<c018d154>] [<c01929e8>] [<c018d179>] \ [<c018d255>] [<c01947ab>] [<c01905a8>] [<c0194638>] [<c0123b3a>] \ [<c0127f40>] [<c0107aac>] Code: c7 05 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 eb 0f 56 53 68 9e 37 1d c0 e8 kmem_free: Bad obj addr (objp=d9ee2f70, name=buffer_head) =========================================================================== Our configuration is a bit exotic in one respect only: We have two Promise Ultra100 PCI cards installed. Otherwise, the system is fairly generic: 1. CPU = 733 MHz Pentium III 133 FSB FC-PGA 2. Motherboard = Asus CUSL2 3. Memory = 512 MB 4. Hard Drive = Western Digital Caviar 14300 EIDE jumpered as master on motherboard primary IDE port 5. CD = Hewlett-Packard CD-Writer Plus 8100i jumpered as slave on motherboard primary IDE port 6. Floppy = none 7. Graphics = On-board Intel 815e VGA graphics connector 8. Monitor = AST SVGA-LR 9. Hard Drives = 2 Promise Technology Ultra100 ATA/100 cards with a total of 3 Maxtor Diamond Max80 80 GB drives on each, two on one channel, and one on the other. Note, though, that only the motherboard sees these six drives, since their drivers are not loaded by the Linux "install" kernel. 10. NIC = 3Com905TN, but we're not yet connected to the net. Any ideas? Cheers, Tony Kocurko - Memorial University of Newfoundland
This is typically an indication of bad hardware, but as always its never definitively that. I suspect its a memory/cpu issue. I've reassigned it to kernel as if its not hardware thats where the problem will lie.
Please delete this bug, or mark it as resolved. The problem seems to be caused by my having had the CD drive as slave to the hard drive master on a single IDE port. Once, I moved the CD to the master role on the secondary IDE port, leaving the hard drive as master on the primary IDE port, the problem went away. There is a new problem, however, which I will investigate further before submitting a report.