From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: I'm finding it impossible to install Red Hat 9 on one of the machines where I tried to do it. The problem is that the installer keeps crashing. Sometimes it crashes with an Oops just before loading /sbin/loader, sometimes it aborts with signal 11 after I say to skip the media check, sometimes it crashes with an Aieee! just before asking if I want to partition using Disk Druid. The one time I got it 'till disk druid it gave an error saying that there was no disk device to partition... Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Put the CD1 in the CD drive 2.Boot the machine Actual Results: It crashes somewhere during the beginning of the instalation. Expected Results: It should run fine. Additional info: The machine in question has a Athlon 1800+ with 256Mb of RAM and an Asus A7S333 motherboard (http://www.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=A7S333&langs=01). The disk is a Western Digital 40G. Additionally I already tried to use a differend HDD, update the BIOS, change varying BIOS settings to no avail. Graphical mode and text mode makes no difference. On a side note I also can't install SuSE 8.2 on it (it stalls on the Partition Check at the beginning) but Windows XP gives no problems.
*** Bug 97432 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
These sound like kernel interactions with your hardware issues.
To be honest I partially agree with that. The thing is the installer crashes more often that I get "Oops"es or "Aiee"s. I can't really reproduce the problem on demand so I reported the bug just in case it wasn't just problems with my hardware. PS: today I tried running knoppix 3.2 on it and it worked fine.
Sounds like hardware. Does the board pass memtest86 ?
I only ran memtest86 for a couple of minutes but it gave no errors.
I tried to install Windows 2K on it and it threw a blue screen at me. Then I had the motherboard replaced by an Asus A7V8X and all is ok now. As the only variable here is the motherboard I conclude that the old board was faulty (as I didn't find any other reports of problems with similar boards and it isn't like they are rare).