Installation using a floppy created from boot.img usually causes a kernel panic when running /sbin/loader. Reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create a boot floppy from /images/boot.img 2. Boot from the floppy. 3. Choose graphical or text install. Actual Results: When using graphical install the success sequence for multiple attempts is 01100011. The two messages received are: Code: 89 08 89 4d 04 74 08 83 fe 01 74 2f eb 51 90 89 59 04 c7 41 Kernel panic: Aiee, killing interrupt handler! In interrupt handler - not syncing and Code: 8b 44 81 f0 83 f8 01 76 08 b8 01 00 00 00 c3 89 f6 48 75 09 Kernel panic: Aiee, killing interrupt handler! In interrupt handler - not syncing Using a text install the sucess sequence is 000001111000. The message received most often is: Code: 39 7a 04 75 23 8b 02 85 c0 89 03 75 03 89 5e 04 52 ff 35 00 Kernel panic: Aiee, killing interrupt handler! In interrupt handler - not syncing On the second failure the result code was: Code: 8b 44 81 f0 83 f8 01 76 08 b8 01 00 00 00 c3 89 fb 48 75 09 On the seventh failure the result code was: Code: cf c7 e8 3f c3 ff ff 85 db 74 2f ff 43 14 3b 5e 50 74 19 68 Using a custom kickstart floppy results in a success sequence of 10111011 with the following result code. Oops: 0000 CPU: 0 EIP: 0010:[<00190209>] EFLAGS: 00010082 eax: e0000101 ebx: c7ed6500 ecx: 00000006 edx: 00000018 esi: e0000101 edi: 00000006 ebp: c023dfa8 esp: c023df64 ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018 Process swapper (pid: 0, stackpage=c023d000) Stack: c010a011 00000006 05070000 c023dfa8 c023dfa8 00000006 c02599c0 c7ed6500 c010a160 00000006 c023dfa8 c7ed6500 c023c000 c0107210 c023c000 ffffe000 c0108f58 c023c000 00000032 00000019 c0107210 c023c000 ffffe000 00000000 Call Trace: [<c010a011>] [<c010a160>] [<c0107210>] [<c0108f58>] [<c0107210>] [<c0107233>] [<c010729a>] [<c0105000>] [<c0100191>] Code: Bad EIP value. Kernel panic: Aiee, killing interrupt handler! In interrupt handler - not syncing Expected Results: anaconda should have started. Booting from the CD-ROM works reliably. This has been attempted on different computers that have the same type of hardware. The motherboard is an Asus A7V with an 850 MHz. AMD Duron and 128MB of PC-133 SDRAM. There is an IDE CD-ROM drive on the VIA primary master, IBM ATA-100 30GB IDE hard drives on a Promise primary master and a Promise Secondary master. Hooking up the hard drives to the VIA controller does not affect the situation. Fisher installs reliably using the CD-ROM or floppies created from boot.img on the same hardware.
Can you try a recent kernel from Rawhide? (version 2.4.2-0.1.25 or later); lot's of bad problems with via chipsets have been fixed in that.
I'm unfamiliar with creating a new boot floppy with a different kernel that will start the RedHat install routine. I created a boot floppy from the Rawhide images/boot.img file and used it with the Wolverine CD's. It fails while trying to create the RAID 1 devices. The apparently relevant error messages are: <6> RAID level 65536 does not need chunksize! Continuing anyway. <3> md.c: personality 3 is not loaded! These messages are repeated for each RAID device.
Well mixing different installers versus the CD won't work unfortionatly.
Also, setting the bios to "normal performance" instead of "optimal performance" tends to fix this. We believe there are some chipset bugs in play here.
The Normal performance option results in the exact same error message for me. Would you like to expand on your instructions for using a Rawhide kernel or create a boot.img with that kernel for me to try?
Please re-open this bug report if you have reproduced this bug in the official release of Red Hat Linux 7.1, thanks!