Description of Problem: The installation failed half way through and asked to save a log file to floppy which I did. On reboot, and trying the installation again, I get a 'reading header - cpio failed' message and am unable to proceed with the installation. How Reproducible: On every reboot. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Disk 1 of 3 in CD-ROM. 2. Press enter when initial installation screen appears. 3. Installation bombs out and last message is 'You can safely reboot your system'. Actual Results: Expected Results: Additional Information:
Created attachment 85325 [details] Error dump
i'd also like to know how 2 solve this problem...?
The problem resolved itself when I appended MEM=32M to the boot option. However, after finishing the installation there was a CRC error on booting using GRUB. I appended mem=64m to the kernel option and Linux came up without a hitch. I assume that Linux will only be accessing 64MB of RAM. Any ideas how I can use the whole 128MB on my machine? I've tried booting with the command mem=96m but the CRC error reoccurs.
What chipset is your motherboard basde on?
The machine is a HP Vectra VL with a Pentium II processor.
what video card is that ? (it can be that you have a video card that "shares" (eg steals) ram and that seems to get misdetected)
The video card is a Cirrus Logic GDS 465
Sorry misread it. It actually is a Cirrus Logic GD5465
This seems much more like bad media to me. Is this an official boxed set installation of Red Hat Linux, or is it a downloaded copy? Either way, try booting the install CD, with "linux mediacheck" to test your CDR media prior to installation. In particular the "cpio read failed" error seems very indicative to me of bad media.
It is an official boxed set. No need to worry about the install since installation worked fine once I had appended mem=32M to the boot option. However, in order for GRUB to load the kernel, I need to append mem=64M as an option. This is inconvenient since the machine has 128M of RAM and is running painfully slowly, presumably because it is only accessing 64M of RAM.
Ok, even though this is a boxed set, booting with the mediacheck is recommended. Although very unlikely, it is possible that your media is defective. Testing it is the best recourse. If the testing succeeds: Does a text mode installation work? Boot with "linux text" to try a text mode install.
Text mode installation HAS worked. RedHat Linux using GNOME or KDE is working fine. What is not working is using Linux without restricting the memory to 64MB. Surely if the install has worked fine, the subsequent memory problem is not going to be due to corrupted media?
That sounds correct. Sounds to me like a kernel issue of some kind, or a hardware issue. Can you provide the complete output of "lspci -vvn" also?
Created attachment 86410 [details] Output from "lspci -vvn" command
I replaced the 128MB ram chip with 256MB ram and it solved the problem. What I don't know is whether the problem was with the actual memory chip or the size of memory (can't think why it would be this). Unfortunately I don't have another 128MB chip to find out which!