Can't install FC4 on a ABS Mayhem F-15 A40 (Turion 64 MT-32) laptop

Vladimir G. Ivanovic vladimir at acm.org
Sat Oct 29 20:25:25 UTC 2005


Zoltan,

Thanks for your suggestions, but unfortunately I don't have another
machine on which to install FC4, particularly FC4-x86_64.

I think I found the bug that talks about ooopsing when installing from
a CD: 159026. There is a link to this discussion:

   http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=59051&page=2&pp=15

which reports success by first typing "mediacheck" (which fails) and
then typing "linux mediacheck". Unfortunately, it's the same story:
does not work for me; same behavior.

--- Vladimir

-- 
Vladimir G. Ivanovic
Palo Alto, CA 94306
+1 650 678 8014

>>>>> "zb" == Zoltan Boszormenyi <zboszor at freemail.hu> writes:

    zb> 
    zb> Hi,
    zb> Vladimir G. Ivanovic írta:
    >> Hi,
    >> I can't get either FC4-i386 or FC4-x86_64 to install on my ABS Mayhem
    >> F-15 A40 Turion 64 (MT-32) laptop. I get
    >> VFS: Cannot open root device "NULL"or unknown block(3,2)
    >> Please append a correct "root=" boot option.
    >> not far into the boot process.
    >> Usually this kind of error occurs when the correct disk controller
    >> driver (IDE, SCSI, etc.) for the boot device is not installed. Here
    >> the boot device would be the CDROM drive which is an IDE device.
    >> I know that the CDROM is found because I get a bunch of boot messages
    >> listing what devices are found, and hdc is there (and the boot
    >> sequence does at least start and continue for a little bit, so stuff
    >> is coming off the CDROM).
    >> Neither the FC4-i386 nor the FC4-X86_64 rescue disks work. They
    >> exhibit the same behavior as above. The FC3-i386 rescue disk and
    >> CentOS 4.2 (x86-64) both boot a bit more than the FC4 installs, but
    >> then pretty quickly the screen goes black and nothing happens.
    >> Gnoppix 0.8 (i386) and Knoppix 3.8 (i386) both boot and run fine.
    >> FreeBSD 6.0-RC1 (amd64) boots and goes into the install process.
    >> And of course, the Windoze XP Home Edition that came with the laptop
    >> works just fine.
    >> Is there some boot command line voodoo I can use to get the
    >> FC4-x86_64
    >> (or even the FC4-i386) version to boot properly? Is there anything
    >> else I should do or not do to get the x86_64 install to work?
    >> Thanks.
    >> --- Vladimir
    >> 
    zb> 
    zb> I experienced the exact same problem on a P4 Celeron machine
    zb> with an AsRock P4VM800 motherboard, so it's not a generic AMD64
    zb> problem. I was able to workaround the problem by putting the hardisk
    zb> into another machine and install FC4 there but I didn't let "firstboot"
    zb> run. Putting back the hdd into the original machine and powering it
    zb> up re-made the install-time configuration, I had nothing to tweak.
    zb> 
    zb> This problem was seen with the original FC4 DVD and another, with
    zb> refreshed erratas that I created with help found in:
    zb> 
    zb> http://fedoranews.org/contributors/gene_czarcinski/update_distro/
    zb> 
    zb> I guessed it's a limitation of the above mainboard's BIOS
    zb> as it doesn't like the following mkisofs options:
    zb> 
    zb> mkisofs -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \
    zb>     -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat ...
    zb> 
    zb> I installed many systems with several mainboards off those
    zb> DVDs easily, though...
    zb> 
    zb> Best regards,
    zb> Zoltán Böszörményi




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