Installation Hangs at Various points

Grez · Guest

Ok, so I'm trying to install Gentoo and I'm getting some really strange hangs during the install. The first time I tried (with the stage 1 disc), the install kept hanging when I was un-tar-ing the stage tarball, forcing me to reboot. It did this a few times, but i finally got through it. Then it would keep hanging when I did emerge rsync, always at the line va-systemimager-server. I could CTRL-C out of this hang, and I tried emerge --clean rsync but this time it hung just after the XXXXX files... part.

So I thought, maybe if I can skip the emerge rsync, so I got the stage 2 + 3 ISO and tried that. Now it's hanging again during the un-tar!! This time it's the line ./boot/boot

Can anyone explain why it might be doing this?

Rain Designs · Posted: Thu Aug 22, 2002 9:19 pm Post subject:

maybe its a hardware problem. What kind of system are you trying to install this on?
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Grez · Guest

PIII 933MHz, Soyo motherboard with VIA chipset, 256mb PC133 SDRAM, Geforce 2 GTS, SB Live, Netgear FA311 NIC. The HD i'm installing on is a Maxtor 13gb, there's also a 60gb IBM deskstar.

I've never had any problems of this kind with other Linux distros on this system.

Grez · Guest

Bump for the day crew, because I'm still stuck

Guest · Posted: Sun Aug 25, 2002 2:13 am Post subject:

I had a similar problem. Setup would hang during stage 1 install, bootstrap to be exact. Everyone said problem was RAM, but, since Windows worked fine, and Gentoo ran stage3 install fine.. I assumed it was just the Gentoo installer. But, it was the RAM, I took out all my ram except one 256meg stick, and now all goes smoothly. Now to figure out which stick is bad O_o

Vanquirius · Posted: Sun Aug 25, 2002 3:49 am Post subject:

yeah, this type of problem is most likely to be ram... I used to know the name of a couple of good free ram tools that detected/fixed leaks & other probs but since I didn't have ram probs in a long while... well... I guess you should be able to download one of these programs somewhere and check your ram...

good luck :-)

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Grez · Guest

OK I fixed it, (well I got it to install!). I figured out that the hard drive was the problem so I tried disabling DMA using

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

What kind of HD? I would think having to disable dma is not a good sign.
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Grez · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2002 Posts: 13

The HD is an old-ish Maxtor 13gig, which I'm pretty sure IS DMA compatible.

I was dubious too, but it's not crashing anymore so I'll have to live with it.

Locke · Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2002 6:24 pm Post subject:

I'm having the same problem. I recently formatted my 1.2/1.3 hybrid install with the idea of starting a gcc-3.2 system from scratch (as I was having trouble doing the update manually). I downloaded a 1.2 bootable ISO and the 1.4 tarball and now my kernel will hang at various points during installation, usually during an emerge rsync. I finally managed to get it through bootstrap, but when I tried 'emerge system' it turned out that nearly all of my digests were corrupt! So I rm -rf app-* dev-* sys-* and so on (all dirs that would have digests) and did an 'emerge rsync' -- HANG!

My hardware:
1.6GHz PIV
512MB PC2100
80GB EIDE hard drive (id'ed as WDC WD800BB - 00CAA0 in Windows)
Lite-on DVD-ROM LTD163
Lite-on LTR-241024B (CD-RW)
Visiontek XSTASY GF4 MX420 (AGP)
Samsung SyncMaster 753DF
M$ Sidewinder Precision 2 USB joystick
Canon S300 printer (USB), off during installation
Logitech PS/2 mouse
Intel PRO/100 VE (or something like that, uses the eepro100 module) NIC

Stuff I've tried so far:
-- re-downloading both the ISO and tarball
-- burning at speeds from 2x to 24x
-- memtest86 (no errors)

I can only use the WinXP ISO Powertoy for burning, as my Nero demo is out of time and FireBurner's demo sucks :|

Partitions:
/dev/hda1 - NTFS (C:)
/dev/hda2 - ext2 (/boot)
/dev/hda5 - swap
/dev/hda6 - NTFS (D:)
/dev/hda7 - XFS (/)
/dev/hda8 - XFS (/home)
/dev/hda9 - FAT32 (E: & /mnt/share)

Does anyone have any ideas as to what could be the problem?
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