Description of Problem: Installer hangs at various places while loading packages. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How Reproducible: Every time. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Wipe disk (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=65536) 2. Boot RH 7.3 CD, enter "text" at boot: prompt. 3. Minimal server installation, auto partition, mostly default selections, (no X!). Actual Results: The installation stalls while installing packages. It stalls at a different place each time. The hard drive activity LED stays on steady. The CD-ROM drive activity LED stays off. I get 100MB to 300MB through the 921MB total before it stalls. It never complains with error messages. I never have gotten to the second disk. If I try a Workstation install, it usually gets stuck during formatting of the big default / partition. Sometimes for Server install, it gets stuck formatting / or /usr partition. Expected Results: Install all packages each time. Additional Information: Installer doesn't completely hang, I can switch between virtual consoles after installer hangs. I can execute ps in second console. It seems that the faster I make my setup selections, the further it gets installing packages until it hangs. Sometime, especially if take a long time making installation options, it will hang while formatting a partition. Media verifies OK, both with mediacheck option and md5sum of disk matches RH site. I've had no trouble running RH 7.2 on this system. I can still restore my old RH 7.2 with dd from a backup drive, and then it runs the old RH 7.2 system just fine. Hardware is cheap sis or sis clone chipset Socket A motherboard (sis630 video, sis900 ethernet) with 1050MHz Athlon w/128MB RAM, 27GB Maxtor IDE drive and IDE CD-ROM drive. I had other issues installing RH 7.3 on this system. See bug #64530.
Jim, Is this like the motherboard hardware I tested for Ron? The issue sounds like media, (althogh blaming CD drives is great sport as well) but may be elsewhere. Is there any helpfile hint in the alternative consoles? -- Russ
Russ, Yes, this is on the hardware that you tested for Ron, the hardware you still have. I have verified the media several times with: dd if=/dev/cdrom of=foo.iso bs=1024 count=652832 md5sum foo.iso yields an md5sum cb91...4c59. Albeit, the dd/md5sum verification was done on different hardware. I have done the mediacheck option on the installation hardware. It passes. I did burn another copy of installation media. Same problem. If CD-R media or CD-ROM drive is the culprit, why would CD-ROM drive LED not be stuck on? BTW, the CD-ROM does not make a lot of noise like it is trying hard to re-read bad spots. If CD-R media or CD-ROM drive is the culprit, why would the hard drive LED be stuck on? Just for fun, I put the old 700MHz Duron back in. No change in behavior, (except slower). I don't see any obvious clues in other consoles, not that I know what to look for. Jim
I restored the stable RH 7.2, then attempted to do an upgrade to RH 7.3. It gets stuck also. Steps to reproduce: Restore old stable RH 7.2 and boot it confirm its health. Boot RH 7.3 Disk 1 boot: text English during installation us keyboard 3 button PS/2 mouse Upgrade Existing System Upgrading RH on /dev/hda9 partition Customize packages to upgrade? No. Detected GRUB on /dev/hda Update boot loader configuration Hangs while displaying "Finding packages to upgrade" I can still switch between virtual consoles. When I execute ps in second console, it hangs after column heading line.
Assigning to an engineer.
Are there any errors about reading the CD on tty4?
There are no reports of errors about reading the CD on tty4. The last lines on tty4 are: ... <6>kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds <6>EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.17, 10 Jan 2002 on ide0(3,2), internal journal <6>EXT-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. <6>kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds <6>EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.17, 10 Jan 2002 on ide0(3,7), internal journal <6>EXT-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * I have experimented much. I have swapped CDs, motherboards, CPUs, memory, CD-ROM drives, UDMA cable to hard drive, and IDE cable to CD-ROM drive. Both of my CDs pass the "boot: linux mediacheck" test. Both of my CDs pass my own dd/md5sum test. I have tried to upgrade the old reliable restored RH7.2 system, with similar failure. tty4 is slightly different then, but still no CD-ROM drive or media error reports. Tty4 looks like below for upgrades: ... <6>kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds <6>EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.17, 10 Jan 2002 on ide0(3,5), internal journal <6>EXT-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. <6>kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds <6>EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.17, 10 Jan 2002 on ide0(3,7), internal journal <6>EXT-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. <6>Adding Swap: 2096440k swap-space (priority -1) The two different motherboards are of similar cheap SiS chipset ilk. I have not, but will, try swapping power supply and hard drive.
I have the *exact* same problem, only I use bootnet.img; so much for the CDROM theory. I have no idea what's going on since there are no error messages on any of the consoles.
More info...My computer inst an Athlon, it's a PII with 256MB RAM. here's more: IRQ 10 S3 ViRGE-DX/GX PCI (375/385) IRQ 10 Intel 82371AB/EB PCI to USB Universal Host Controller IRQ 10 IRQ Holder for PCI Steering IRQ 11 Realtek RTL8029(AS) PCI Ethernet NIC IRQ 11 IRQ Holder for PCI Steering IRQ 14 Primary IDE controller (dual fifo) IRQ 14 Intel 82371AB/EB PCI Bus Master IDE Controller IRQ 15 Secondary IDE controller (dual fifo) IRQ 15 Intel 82371AB/EB PCI Bus Master IDE Controller Is there any specific info that you want to know?
Emprical results: The installation always gets stuck when installing to a 27GB Maxtor hard drive. When the installation stalls, the hard drive LED is always stuck on. The CD-ROM drive never acts like it trying hard to read something when the installation is stuck. This is repeatable. The installation is always successful when installing to three other hard drives that I've tried: 80GB Maxtor, 40MB Maxtor and 6.3GB Samsung. This is repeatable. The 27GB Maxtor hard drive is Model 92720U8. I have no trouble restoring and running RH 7.2 on it. I only have trouble installing RH 7.3 on it. Swapping the following things had no effect on the result. motherboards memory power supply CD-ROM drive CD-R disks ordinary IDE cable to CD-ROM drive UDMA IDE cable to hard drive Swapping the hard drive does matter. The CD-R installation media is not the problem. They pass all the tests I have tried, and work fine for installing to the non-27GB hard drives. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The failure to install the 27GB is puzzling, since that drive works just fine with RH 7.2. Here are my thoughts. Maybe there is some bad sector on the drive. Perhaps the installation gets stuck on a part of the drive that the RH 7.2 system does not exercise. So I will do an exhaustive hard drive test. Perhaps there is some design vulnerability in the drive that RH 7.2 does not provoke, but RH 7.3 does. Could UDMA be such a vulnerability?
Dear pintom.mil, What make and model hard drive are you installing to? When your installation gets stuck, is the hard drive LED stuck on? Is the CD-ROM drive trying to read? What happens when you install to a different hard drive?
No problems are found with the 27GB Maxtor drive when I execute: badblocks -s -v -w /dev/hdd1
I found a roundabout way to get RH 7.3 on the 27GB Maxtor drive. Using dd, copy a successful installation from a smaller drive to the difficult drive. Both drives have the same number of heads and sectors per track.
I can't reproduce this at all here. Arjan, any idea on anything that might be causing this?
Hi all, I'd like to add another data point. I have the same exact problem (100% reproducible) on the following configuration: - Gigabyte GA 6VX7+ mainboard, bios revision F3 - Intel Celeron 433MHz, FSB 66MHz - 2x 256MB DIMM - harddisk Maxtor 90854D4, 8GB, A40CWJ1C, 1998.12.08 - "linux mediacheck" passed on this configuration - disk partitioned using Disk Druid - reproducible using unmodified Server install - reproducible using Custom install - installation hangs somewhere during package installation, for example ht://dig and Perl were two occurrences - VC's keep responding; python installer stops responding There must be something different about the 7.3 installer; I have severe installation problems for 7.3 on at least 2 of my machines, while 7.2 installs without a hitch. Greetings, Ed.
Jim was over this afternoon, and we spend several hours with Limbo 2 -- the drive and motherboard in question which were acting up are able to be wiped and re-tested -- I send Limbo 2 CD's with him a couple of days ago ... ... but I also worked through an FTP install method with him
Hi folks, It definitely is an interaction between the harddrive and the RedHat installer. I reproduced the problem using RHL 7.2 and 7.3 with the Maxtor 90854D4, 8GB, A40CWJ1C, 1998.12.08. This morning I replaced the disk with a Maxtor 32049H3 20GB (N3R22HWC, 2000.09.14). The rest of the configuration remained identical. This time, the RedHat 7.3 install went flawlessly. Greetings, Ed.
I have replicated the issue with RH Limbo 7.3.93 It gets stuck during formatting of /home or /usr partitions. Hardware is cheap sis or sis clone chipset Socket A motherboard (sis630 video, sis900 ethernet) with 1050MHz Athlon w/128MB RAM, 27GB Maxtor IDE drive and IDE CD-ROM drive. Installation CD-R passes dd/md5sum test and Limbo's Media Check.
I reset the BIOS settings. It still gets stuck during formatting of /home or /usr partitions for Limbo 7.3.93. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From a working RH 7.3 installation on a different drive, the output of lspci -v -v -v for the rest of the machine is at http://www.colug.net/~jep/lspci-v-v-v.
Jim brought the box over and I beat on it -- It looks as though the on board hard drive driver is taking control, and silently dying, possibly when on a DMA excursion ... The mkfs gets 23 of about 200 inode tables in on / (having done /boot) -- when I manually mkfs and bypass having anaconda do it, I get about 10 packages into the install, and lock up at e2fsutils ... I will attach some traces in a moment of various items (lscpi -v -v -v and drive parameters in /proc) snapshotted to floppy in rescue CD mode
Created attachment 69664 [details] lspci and friends
After a thread on valhalla list I mentioned Maxtor issues to Jim. He wen Googleing and found: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=maxtor+92720U8+linux Maybe we are rediscovering the wheel. How do we tell the kernel to be VERY conservative with this drive? -- is tehre a check on drive model number which can automate this process? ----------------------------------------- URGENT README :: Rogier (Re: DMA Disabled.) Andre Hedrick (andre) Fri, 27 Aug 1999 20:19:19 -0700 (PDT) Messages sorted by: [ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ] Next message: Andre Hedrick: "Re: Oops 2.3.15 in piix_config_drive_for_dma" Previous message: Matthew Wilcox: "[PATCH] binfmt_elf cleanups" In reply to: Alberto Mardegan: "[IDE] hdc: status error: status = 0x58" You got it right Rogier. There is an uncorrectable timing chatter between the DMA mode 2 WD31600 and the UDMA Maxtor 92720U8. This is really problematic on the all PIIXx chipsets that I have observed. It has nothing to do with Intel's hardware, it is an issue between the two drive venders. WD + Maxtor (same channel) == cat and dog in bag. (One animal is going to damage the other.) Disable all DMAing for data safety and split the devices to separate channels. I do not care what is where. I fear that you will find FS-Corruption from the hardware level. I spent four weeks and daily reinstalls to finally pick up the phone and call Maxtor. (Note that WD does not care about Linux, not a viable OS). There is on a pretty way to impliment this kind of detection, or I would have. Andre Hedrick The Linux IDE guy On Fri, 27 Aug 1999, Rogier Wolff wrote:
Note that this may have just become a kernel issue, and may no longer be an Anaconda issues...
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/