From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; T312461) Description of problem: When trying to install RH 7.2 on a PC with 440GX chipsen (Intel L440GXB4+ server board) and an Adaptec ATA 2400A IDE RAID controller, the installer locks the PC right after writing "booting the kernel." to the monitor. Starting the installation with: linux apic as normally required with this kind of chipset/board does not solve the problem. The installation has been tried from a "normal" RH 7.2 CD, and from and updated set with Kernel 2.4.9-21 - both freezes completely when trying to boot the kernel. Removing the ATA 2400A card makes the installation run without problems when starting with "linux apic". Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Power PC on 2. Boot from RH 7.2 CD 3. Type linux apic at boot prompt 4. press enter. Actual Results: PC froze/locked up Expected Results: Installation should have started. Additional info:
--------------------- Most implementations using the 440GX chipset require the "apic" option to function correctly. When this is the case, providing DMI information to Red Hat as documented below[1] may allow us to automate that setting in the future. On some systems, the "apic" boot flag may not work. Unfortunately, because of Intel Proprietary information, these platforms are not supported at this time. ----------------------- (Official Intel approved statement about 440GX vs linux) You can try moving the card to other slots, maybe that helps.
Moving the card to another slot solved the problem. The question is than what made the system lock up so quick - in such a way that the question for a driver disk wasn't presented. Since the question for the driver wasn't presented it must be assumed, that the problem relies somewhere between the 440GX chipset and the kernel.
Oh absolutely, or rather "chipset+bios" and the kernel. There's bugs in the bios we informed Intel about but Intel refuses to fix them, and they are refusing to help fix other issues re 440GX :(