[sclug] woody netinst (bf kernel)

[Will Dickson]

Chris Aitken wrote:

>Hi All,
>
>(Now that we're back online!)
>
>I don't suppose anyone heading to the meet on Wed has a woody netinst CD
>with the bf kernel?
>
>I have spent 2 evenings battling against the debian installer (cds &
>floppies) trying to get woody back on my dev box, to no avail!! A mixture of
>kernel panics, crashes, and debconf problems seem to be bugging me.
>
>  
>
I smell hardware. Specifically, I smell iffy memory. Have 
you done any kind of soak test on it? I'd be astonished if 
the Debian install system doesn't include strong
checksumming (MD5 or SHA-1, at a guess), which would prevent 
corrupt code getting on the box in the first place. It'd 
either install a fair copy or it wouldn't install at all.

>
>I changed processor (Pentium 2 266 to cyrix 350 Mhz), and it ran ok for
>weeks, but I wanted a clean install, and its all going wrong.
>
This presumably means you changed the mobo as well? While I 
appreciate this probably isn't the news you want to hear at 
this point, your upgrade might not give you as much boost
as you'd expect - cyrixes have weak FPUs, and I'm not sure 
how much cache they have, either. I'd guesstimate that the 
likely effective speedup would be about 15%, or possibly
even less. If the old mobo isn't fried you might be better 
off failing  back to it.

At the risk of teaching granny to suck eggs, have you 
double-checked that the CPU and case fans are working,
and that there's enough room round the RAM to
allow reasonable air convection? Especially important with 
the weather how it is - a friend had a machine that
kept crashing randomly until we tied back all the IDE cables 
that were coiled round the SIMMs, blocking the airflow and 
making them overheat.

Best of luck


Will.

PS. I initially sent this to Chris offlist by mistake - oops.