Created attachment 915111 [details] Comment (This comment was longer than 65,535 characters and has been moved to an attachment by Red Hat Bugzilla).
I get exactly the same crash trace on a no-name PC installing onto a fresh hard disk. I've tried installing four or five times using different options and each and every time I get the same problem. -- -|merio. red_hat_man.co.uk
First, media checked CDs and checked MD5 sums (have two sets of self made CDs) and all OK. One set has had one successfull installation on a low end no-name PC. Second, having tried several sets of different options on two PCs no less, the problem remains. Whilst reading some of the bug reports, all effectively reporting the same problem, I have evolved a work-around. WORK- AROUND Once the first installation has failed as per the bug, simply re-run the and do an upgrade, not a fresh install. This completes the installation after a fahsion, but not to the original option set. Make a boot floppy diskette and use that to boot your new install; then perform the necessary fix-ups to complete install, e.g. boot loader, etc. Its a pain but it gets the system there eventually. INTERSTING for RED HAT DEV TEAM (maybe) The upgrade continues where the original crash occurred, i.e. the install of the openjade package. It seems that the crash may be _coincident_ with the installers request (or fail to request) a CD change from disk 1 to disk 2. Does this help? Let me know if you want any further info. -- - |merio. red_hat_man.co.uk
Second workaround. Install to a primary drive/partition rather than a secondary drive or 'other' partition. The problem fails to materialise. Please also note that bugzilla has had at least 10 plus occurance of this or similar issues. -- -|merio. red_hat_man.co.uk
Created attachment 68485 [details] anaconda Traceback and error dump
Looks like same problem, installation halted abnormally in RedHat 7.3 Linux install from CDs, CDs purchased from RedHat. anaconda Traceback seems to be exactly the same as above, but I have attached contents of dump if you want to check in detail. Hardware: Somewhat older Dell XPS H233, purchased about 8/97. Bios 1.00.02.DT0J (A01) pentium II chip, 266MHz, 512KB 128MB Ram 3com 3c590 PCI ethernet card Adaptec AHA-2940 Ultra SCSI 4GB EIDE hard drive Microsoft Intellimouse Dell 1028L monitor Number 9 FX Motion 711, 2MB RAM video card Scsi hard drive attached, Seagate something Hit the same problem 3 times, twice in graphics install, once in text mode. Seems like problem occurs at exactly the same place, close to end of installation of rpm files from 2nd installation disk. Hung during installation of file w3c-libwww-devel-5.3.25. There was about 4MB remaining of 1600 or so MB total in the install. I was getting several CDROM read errors during the installation from 2nd installation CD, before the abnormal halt. This happened all 3 times I tried the install, always on the 2nd installation CD, not on the first one. Obviously could be problems with 2nd CD, but I used this same CD set to install RedHat 7.3 on three other machines with no trouble. (So, obviously could be problem with my CDROM reader on this machine, although as I said, it read the first installation CD without any trouble). I worked through the read errors by hitting return several times (as the message on the screen told me to do), whereupon it proceeded. I also noticed that the read errors always seemed to occur at the beginning of an rpm package, never during the the actual installation of that package. After I dumped error message to disk (see attachment) it said it was safe to reboot, which I did, ended up with a grub> prompt, seems to have some kind of minimal system installed. I'm going to follow the workaround suggested above, and try to reinstall in upgrade mode.
Please test your CDs following these instructions: http://people.redhat.com/~msf/mediacheck.html
OK, I ran the media check on all 3 of my CD's, they all came out clean. So I don't know why I was getting read errors on CD #2. I did this media check on the same machine (same CDROM reader) as the one that was giving errors.
About Workarounds...the one suggeted above (to do an upgrade on top of the incomplete install) did not work for me, I had the same error on the upgrade as I had had previously on the install. Instead I copied the contents of my Installation CDs to another computer (a web server), made a boot disk, and then did a web-based http installation. Worked easily. See instructions in the installation guide and in the README file on the Installation CDs. Of course this won't work if you don't have another computer (or a web server you can put 1.5 GB onto). Send me an email if you have any questions about this.
I've seen dozens of these situtations where a CD is intermittent on one machine and works fine on others. The mediacheck is not a necessarily an accurate measure of how well the CD will work during an install, which has a different access pattern. I've been thinking about how to correct this but haven't had time. Glad to hear its working now.