Ubuntu installer kernel panic
Andy and I spent about three hours on the phone yesterday trying to boot Ubuntu on his machine. He’s put a new hard drive in it, so there’s no OS on the machine at all (the old HDD got scragged, so he bought a new one). He’s got Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary install and live CDs, and they kernel panic as soon as they boot; before you even get to the menus. We seem to have narrowed it down to a problem with the memory, but it’s difficult to tell ‘cos memtest86 isn’t on those CDs. Debugging over the phone is a slow process, and poor Andy is without a machine at the moment because I don’t know how to fix it…
I recently installed Ubuntu 5.10 on my old desktop, and I’m pretty sure that the GRUB menu included a Memtest86 option in there (might have been on the install CD bootup — my memory is a little hazy).
So try that, if it’s not on 5.04? You might as well install the latest version to begin with anyhow…
Also, on some boxes it helps to boot with ACPI disabled (sucks on laptops, but might be workable on a desktop). And a friend’s computer with a GeForce 6800 really didn’t like the standard “nv” driver and wouldn’t start X.org until we switched to “vesa” and eventually “nvidia”.
4 hours later
Angus: yes, it’s on the 5.10 CD. No, it’s not on the 5.04 CD, sadly. He doesn’t have a working computer, and so can’t download a breezy CD to try :(
We tried disabling ACPI (linux noapic nolapic at the boot prompt) and it didn’t help…
7 hours later
This isn’t convincing me to try Linux, by the way ;-)
37 hours later
G: yeah, yeah, we know. It’s Andy’s magic ability to break electronic equipment near him, I’m sure of it.
2 days later
Erm, did you MD5 the disc to be sure it had downloaded OK?
I had this problem once before when the CD was actually at fault. My own stupidity, burning it on Windows!!
2 days later
I had the kernel panic when trying to install 5.10 on an old laptop. memtest86 didn’t report any problems. The ISOs (I tried live & install of both Ubuntu and Kubuntu) MD5 were correct. Downloaded Ubuntu install again (checksum correct), burned at lowest possible speed, and still getting kernel panic. And nobody answered me when I posted on the Ubuntu forum. I gave up, and a week later the laptop didn’t even start up.
2 days later
I had 5.04 and had the same problem - getting 5.10 is the best way to solve it :)
2 days later
I had the same prob with 5.04 but 5.10 runs smoothly almost everywhere.
Neverthless, Cindy, a costumer had the same issues with an old laptop.
We’ve tryed it all Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, you name it… :(
We also search everywhere for help but it seemed that this was a unusual machine from the old days where Linux and laptops mixed very badly.
The only one the installed flawlessly was SuSE 9.3 Professional, don’t ask why because we still don’t know :)
It even recognized the pad and the PCMCIA wireless card.
Best.
10 days later
Sorry for the bad english :D
It is also very late here and the brain is starting to malfunction.
G: The advantage of Linux is that you have plenty. One of the distros will surely work :)
Cindy: Try SuSE 10. It may work ;)
10 days later
I don’t know If this can help someone….
I’ve got an old HP laptop OmniBook XE2 P266 128 RAM since 1999. I installed Ubuntu Warty on it one year ago without problems. When Ubuntu Hoary was released, I upgraded it again without problems.
In June I decided it was time to buy a new computer and I bought a workstation P4 3GHz 1GB RAM.I installed Ubuntu Hoary on it and again without problems!. Then I used old laptop as proxy (Squid) and WebServer (Apache, Tomcat, MySQL) and it worked fine.
When Breezy was released,first I tried to upgrade the laptop but I got some problems with X server and finally I decided to reinstall Ubuntu completely. I found that it was impossible. The installation process was never finished. I tried running the live CD and it was loaded correctly. Finally I succeded entering “linux acpi=off” in the command line of the installation process.
I spent two weeks hesitating if I should upgrade my new workstation where I enjoyed viewing DVDs, listening to the radio and I’ve also got a lot of personal documents and software installed.
Finally, I decided to upgraded it. After the installation, gnome didn’t work; the symptoms where the same as with the old laptop. I’ve solved all the problems following step by step the post-install indications of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BreezyUpgradeNotes
I’ve also installed Ubuntu in my office’s workstation (Dell P4 512 RAM) keeping a partition with XP without problems.
Last week I decided to install ubuntu in my mother’s old workstation (it is the legacy it gave her when I left home). She was always complaining that Window98 was to slow and every two months I had to format the disk to clean the spywares. I’ve tried almost everything (acpi=off , noapic,…) but I cannot install it. Probably it’s too old (1998). Can anyone help me? I think my mum doesn’t diserve a Windows98 desktop
3 weeks later