install freezing at different stages

equilibrium · Apprentice Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 213 Location: UK

Hi,
I have been trying to install gentoo for the past few nights and have been having trouble. It keeps on halting and losing the prompt or it halts altogether and the keyboard stops responding. It has halted on extracting the stage tar, then on chroot and then just after doing env-update. I have tried re-paritioning my hdd again just in case but it made no difference. I also ran the memtest last night for a few hours and got no errors.

I have tried re-writing the cd at 4x and have checked the md5sum of the iso and it seems to be correct.

I have a pentium4 1.6a on TH7-II mobo with 512mb PC800 RDRAM.

help!!!! :roll:

snutte · Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2003 11:12 am Post subject:

I have kinda the same problem. My computer halts and I cannot continue the install if my screen "blanks" out after about 15 minutes. So I have to press a key everynow and then when I install. But when Ive installed and I use my own kernel and such, everything works great.

slartibartfasz · Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2003 11:38 am Post subject:

@snutte

equilibrium · Apprentice Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 213 Location: UK

I have the cpu etc set to default speed

and not even getting as far as setting any optimisation in the make.conf

.

I think it maybe my hdd but seems strange how it stops at different stages. But the stages it's stopping at seem to be the ones where I'm using the hdd ?? like extracting the tar and chroot etc ???. I ran memtest so the ram must be ok. Only other thing I was thinking was maybe changing the BIOS??

I might change the hdd as the current linux one is a few years old. I have been able to run mandrake and suse ok. But earlier on trying to install slackware the machine halted on extracting the packages

.

slartibartfasz · Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2003 12:16 pm Post subject:

look at the homepage of the vendor of the hdd, perhaps they have a diagnostics/repair tool - saved me one or the other hd...
_________________
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zbert · n00b Joined: 01 Jul 2003 Posts: 37 Location: New York

possumjc · Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2003 3:39 am Post subject:

equilibrium--
I had a similar problem when I first tried to install gentoo. It turns out that I had set my options in make.conf to -march=athlon-tbird and that was breaking things. The install would die at different times. Sometimes it would almost get through emerge sync and once I even got emerge system to work. I even lost everything on my HDD because grub killed it. It took me days to try a different optimization setting. I now just use -mpcu=athlon and everthing is working fine. Hope that this helps..

hughesjr · n00b Joined: 10 Aug 2003 Posts: 51

Instead of pressing the space bar ... press a key that won't effect the install in any way .... like alt or ctrl or shift .... it will wake up the screen, but it won't pass info to the install.

Also, if you enable and start gpm, then you can move the mouse to wake up....

see this thread for gpm:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=56953

zbert · n00b Joined: 01 Jul 2003 Posts: 37 Location: New York

Thanks. I'll give it a try. I actually have an Athlon XP and a Pentium 4 that I am installing. I've gotten a lot further with the P4 than I have with the Athlon. I'll try your suggestion and see if it helps.
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--zbert