beep and crash during install

Rustyj1970 · n00b Joined: 16 Feb 2009 Posts: 8

hello all, I have a 2.8ghz Pentium 4 with 512 megs of ram with a ATI vidio card and a 500 gig SATA drive. I downloaded the live 2008 gentoo disk and burned it out using K3B. During the installation of the 105 packages on the disk it will give one short beep and crash on package 40/105, everytime. Suspecting a bad disk a created a second one with the same result on package 55/105 this time. A 3rd disk crashing on package 53/105. I have been able to successfully install Fedora 10, Damn Small 4.4 and Ubuntu 8.10 on the system. Even so I suspect dodgy hardware. Any thoughts?

alex.blackbit · Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2005 Posts: 2397

since the crashes seam to be random (giving that you used identical configurations), it looks like you have a hardware problem.
compiling source code means heavy cpu load over a long time. most desktop system are not used in such a way until the first gentoo installation.

check your cooling.
what exactly does "crash" mean. please provide more information.

Rustyj1970 · n00b Joined: 16 Feb 2009 Posts: 8

Hi Alex, thanks for the reply. The system would give one short beep and then become unresponsive. Example you can no longer move the mouse. This state lasts about 5 to 10 seconds and then the PC shuts off, powers down. The previous owner of the system says that it ran fine for the most part with XP and Ubuntu 8.04, however he reports that if you tried to archive a gig of data it would cause Ubuntu to crash and that this was repeatable even after reformatting. So yes I really do think its a hardware issue that only shows up in a stress test. I suspect the CPU or motherboard, if it was ram I think it would randomly crash no matter what I was doing.

One thing however Alex, I thought the liveCD installed binaries, am I mistaken in this, I mean the install was going vary fast, id think the system would crawl if it were compiling.

alex.blackbit · Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2005 Posts: 2397

well, maybe that's true. i never used this live cd to install gentoo.

Rustyj1970 · n00b Joined: 16 Feb 2009 Posts: 8

well folks it was hardware, the thermal paste on that old Pentium D (not a 4 after all) was worn out. The CPU got up to 85C. reapplied it the paste and was able to successfully install and boot Gentoo 2008 i386. as a 10 year debian user I feel like a linux noob all over again, cheers.