From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt) Description of problem: When booting from the RH7.1 CDROM, and running *any* install mode (normal, expert, lowres, nofb, text) it gets to the "/sbin/loader" execution fairly quickly, and then becomes "CPU starved". How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: When booting from the RH7.1 CDROM and proceeding with any install option, it literally takes 30-60 minutes to go from "blue screen" to "blue screen with 'running anaconda - please wait'" and 2-3 hours to get to the point where the GUI screen is displayed. At that point the mouse is non- responsive, and proceeding via keyboard control takes several minutes to change screens. Additional info: The system has everything possible removed and disabled. Basic specs are: IWIL MOBO (Via CS), Intel 800MHz Celeron, 256MB RAM, 40GB HD, basic Matrox VGA. Onboard USB is disabled. The only add in card is PCI VGA. Has one HD (IDE 0 Master), one CDROM (IDE 1 Master), and one FDD.
Does the kernel identify all your memory? Can you look on VC2 and run 'cat /proc/meminfo'?
On VC2, 'cat /proc/meminfo' took over 1 minute to display output, and it appears to see all the system RAM. Summary: Total: 261,763,072 Used: 24,494,080 Free: 237,268,992 Buffers: 4,333,568 Cached: 14,729,216
Wow. I've never seen anything like this. The output of 'cat /proc/meminfo' should be instantaneous. This sounds like it could be a kernel problem...I can't think of anything in the installer that would cause this to happen. Can you look on VC3 and VC4 and see if there are any error messages? There could be problems reading the cdrom. If you listen to the machine, does it sound like the cdrom drive is spinning down and then spinning up again repeatedly?
I was seeing a number of errors on VC4 pertaining to the CDROM, though the CD was not spinning or starting/stopping repeatedly. Most of the errors were hdX: Interrupt Lost. I first saw hdc, when the CDROM was Secondary IDE Master, and then hdb after I tried switching to Primary Slave. I confirmed master/slave jumper on drive, tried swapping actual CDROM drives, internal ribbon cables, primary to secondary controllers, etc. At this point I suspect the motherboard. Do you have an opinion? I believe I will try a different MOBO.
It could be the motherboard...but I can't be sure. It does sound like something is not quite right with the hardware.
I exchanged the IWILL VX133 w/800MHz Celeron for an IWILL 266 with a 900 MHz AMD Athlon and it ran normally the first time I tried to install RH7.1. I also upgraded the Video to NVIDIA 32 MB AGP. Sorry to bother you guys with what turned out to be a hardware issue (but it may be a Linux/VX133 compatibility issue). Thanks for your help and time.