From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) Description of problem: Installer crashes. First I thought it might be the aic7xxx module as I was seeing scsi errors. I tried using the boot.img on bug 29555 with apic option with no success. I also tried ide=nodma with equal results (always exiting at some point). I was seeing some video errors so I have tried expert and text, I can get further but still crashes when formating. To rule out the scsi module, I removed the scsi card and tried IDE disk problems showing up when partitioning the system. I think there must be an I/O or IRQ problem, probably with the video card as it often exits starting X. Next I installed on the IDE on another machine, recompiled using aic7xxx latest patch 6.1.13 and with AMD processor and moved the IDE to this machine. It went OK until trying run Xconfigurator or starting X. At that point a lot of core dumps and then system. After restart, system file would be corrupt. Now it will get up to the login but won't accept the login (it will breifly show the last login message and then go back to login prompt) How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Try to install 2. 3. Actual Results: Crash with signall 11, or freeze up. Expected Results: Complete install Additional info: System: Mobo - Gigabyte's GA-7DX Processor - Athlon Thunderbird 1200 Video - ATI Xpert98 AGP (a RageXL chip with 8M) Adaptec 19160 scsi controller card Seagate 18.4GB 15rpm Cheetah scsci disk 3com etherlink PCI server NIC adapter 512Mg DDR SDRAM - Mushkin Creative Labs - CD 52X EIDE cd-rom Linux Deluxe Workstation 7.1 retail box. Custom partitions: /boot /dev/sda1 15M swap /dev/sda2 512M / /dev/sda3 512M /home /dev/sda5 4G /tmp /dev/sda6 512M /var /dev/sda7 1G /usr /dev/sda8 2.5G /u0 /dev/sda9 what's left(~7G)
I decided to make a change on the hardware. Normally the motherboard would be working at 133Mhz/33 to be able to use the Thunderbirds front bus capacity of 266Mhz. Since most of the errors I was seeing were printing out CPU dumps, I decided to lower the bus velocity to 100Mhz/33. I then was able to install stock 7.1. I had tried the machine using Windows at full speed with no problems. Could it be the kernel isn't handling the added speed of the CPU and memory (as I understand, they are linked in this board, so raising one raises the other.) Right now the CPU is working at 900Mhz (not 1200 as it should). How can I increase the speed again without hitting the same problems?
This sounds like flakey hardware to me... The problems may not be exposed as well by Windows, but your downgrading of the speed solving the problems would strongly indicate the problem being hardware. The FSB speed of the CPU is irrelevant.