[sclug] woody netinst (bf kernel)

[Chris Aitken]

> >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.

No soak test done. Wouldn't know where to start either!

> >
> >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.

Nope. Its an old AT (not even ATX!), I think it is socket 7, and so Pentium
II/AMD K7/Cyrix tend to all drop in and run perfectly (after changiong
jumpers of course), so its the same mobo. And as mentioned above - it was
running ok, pre-reinstall :(
>
> 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.

Certainly a sensible solution. A while ago (old flat, cold time of year) the
original CPU fan packed up, and I was getting the same kind of faults.
Certainly now that the temperature in my 1st floor flat is probably 20
degrees C above what it was in my old place.

Unfortunately being an old AT board, the memory tends to live betweent the
CD drives and the PSU! CPU is at the front of the case (only CPU fan, no
case fans!).

> Best of luck

I'll need it! Or I'll install in winter ;)
>
> Will.
>
> PS. I initially sent this to Chris offlist by mistake - oops.

I always do this on the sclug list - its learning to click reply to all!

Chris


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.