Trying to install from LiveCD, Athlon, 1.4 (disk 1 only). The bootloder loads and regardless of which kernel I choose or options I select, the same results are produced: Load kernel. (many dots) Load init ramdisk ("initrd.1024") (many dots) Print "Ready." Hang on black screen of death (with blinking cursor). No further disk activity, network activity, et al. No change in machine behaviour after 24 hours. Current hardware is: AMD Athlon XP 2400 Gigabyte GA-7VA (BIOS F9) 2x512MB DDR/333 ECC SDRAM Adaptec AHA-2940UW Pioneer DVR-104 (Mandrake boot disk goes here.) Pioneer DVD-305S [other SCSI devices: Jaz, scanner] Chaintech GeForce FX 5900, 8x AGP, 256MB SB Audigy Platinum Memtest86 (v. 3.0) generates no errors after a week of continuously running on this machine. This same hang is produced in the Mandrake 9.1 and 9.2 installers, but not with the Red Hat 9.0 installer. Tried the most commonly suggested workaround: gentoo noapic acpi=off mem=800 Have found a similar problem on the Linux kernel message boards, but relevant for kernels around 2.5.73 (or thereabouts). Apparently, the resolution was to load with ldlin (though I don't see why and no useful information was mentioned beyond this summary). Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Insert Gentoo Linux 1.4 AMD Athlon install CD 2. Select any kernel 3. Wait for kernel and init ramdisk to load and "Ready." message. Actual Results: A blank text mode screen was produced with a blinking cursor in position 0,0. Expected Results: Ideally, loaded a kernel, producing zillions of lines of load messages, then continued with a (stage 1) install.
Note that "(Mandrake boot disk goes here.)" is left over from the equivalent issue on the Mandrake support boards. I cut and pasted the hardware list and forgot to remove this annotation before committing the message. <sigh> But this does remind me: The erroneous behaviour is observed when booted from either DVD drive (-ROM or -RW), for all tested failing distributions. The Gentoo (and Mandrake) media successfully install to other machines (not a bad CD image).
I have identified a work-around, but do not know what the problem is or how to fix it. I inadvertently left one of our Jaz disks (for backups of the Win98 partition) in the Jaz drive during the last attempt to install Linux. Suddenly it worked. Workaround: Jaz drive empty: bootloader loads and uncompresses kernel and halts. Jaz drive loaded: bootloader successfully vectors to the loaded kernel. This appears to be a long-standing, poorly discussed (many hours of web searching finally turned up a similar problem description for PPC Linux). Then I finally found section 6.6 of http://packetstormsecurity.nl/linux/admin/Mini-HOWTOs-FAQs/Jaz-Drive which described the problem and the same workaround I found, but no way to fix th problem.
I am seeing this as an upstream-bug which we aren't able to solve.
