Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 36123
Installer hangs or chrashes on Dell Inspiron 3200
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:32:41 EDT
Okey... This is gonna be long one. On my first attempt to istall 7.1 on Inspiron 3200 the installer hanged after having transfered about 45% (I mean it!) disk image to hard drive. Wow! This is far! Read on. During this transfer and before (while launching of anaconda and Xfree) I observed "lost interrupts" from hdc (Toshiba XM-1702BC). I replugged the laptop to the outlet and proceeded with second attempt. This time the installer was not able to work with Xfree and fell back to text mode. Suprisingly, Xfree survived in the memory. After choosing language and keyboard it crushed again (signal 11). I was suggested to reboot. This time ctrl-alt-del worked. On my third attempt. Installer was not even able to start Xfree. Signal 11 agan. Ctrl-alt-del, again... and so on and so on. Basically I was never able to reach my first "success" and was observing only two last scenarios. Until I rebooted to Win98, then back to my attempts to install 7.1. After this I again observed first scenario for once... I did play with bios settings for HDD performance etc for a while with no success. Dell (Phoenix) BIOS v.A11 is very limited in this respect here. I totally suspect bad hardware. If so I would love to hear if somebody installed 7.1 on Inspiron 3200. Reproducible: Always, but scenarios are different Steps to Reproduce: 1. Dell Inspiron 3200 2. Try to install 3. try to install again, and again
This sounds like a hardware problem to me. I would suggest re-downloading 7.1...maybe something got corrupted during the transfer. I don't know if we tested an Inspiron 3200 specifically, but I've done a lot of tests on Inspirons of 7.1 with no trouble.
What kind of install were you doing (FTP, NFS, HTTP)? Were you trying an ftp install over the web or from a server inside your LAN?
I got ISO images from UCSD.edu mirror and burned CDs. They worked perfectly fine at home (no install warning whatsoever, smooth and clean). I'll double- check them with md5 tomorrow. It may be a hardware problem. I found a lot of problem reports about Toshiba XM-1702BC just by searching for "1702BC" on Google. Here is one: http://www.linuxarkivet.nu/mlists/mandrake-newbie/0012/msg01615.html Here is another about win2000 problems, just for fun of it: http://zurich.ai.mit.edu/hypermail/thinkpad/1999-12/0347.html and finally: http://www.lib.uaa.alaska.edu/linux-kernel/archive/2000-Week-48/0511.html with a reply to it by Jens Axboe. We should have another laptop with sich CD-ROM.. I'll try that one too.
Ok, I'm waiting on you.
Closing due to inactivity. Please reopen if you have more information.
I've had Redhat Professional Server 7.1 for a while and i've tried installing it numerous times on my Dell Inspiron 3200, and the same thing happens. It gets about 45 - 50% installed and then just hangs. Yet, I've installed RH7.1 on numerous other computers with no problems.
After a number of months trying to install RH7.1, i just was able to install it onto my Dell Inspiron 3200, but I could only install the core parts of linux. Nothing else. Any suggestions?