[PLUG] linux issues, identical hardware, one works with linux, the other just with windows. Solar flares?

Karol Kulaga root at loraksus.org
Wed Nov 5 20:23:01 UTC 2003


Okie dokie. I seem to have a possessed machine that just doesn't seem to
want any version of Linux on it. Sorry about the length, but I wanted to get
a lot of details in here.

In a nutshell, windows 98+2k3 works on the box that I want to put linux on.
I can stress test it without problems and it has been stable as far as I can
remember. No hardware errors showing up in event viewer, etc. I don't think
it has ever blue screened under 2k3 (uptime was 62 days when I rebooted to
put linux on) 98 is a POS, but I had it running on that box for some reason
about 6 months ago, I don't recall it being any more unstable than usual.

Linux distros don't seem to work. I've tried 2 so far.
Now, what makes this interesting is that I have the identical board with the
identical power supply, case, floppy, et al (dif proc speed 2100xp vs
2400xp, same board + bios rev too). Linux works fine with that, as far as I
can tell, none of the errors the bad machine is getting.
So, same hardware, except the "good" box has an audigy and a scsi raid card.
Different video card ("bad" box having an old matrox, "good" is a radeon
7500).
A gig of ram in the good one, 256mb in the "bad".

I've tried Slackware 9.1 and redhat shrike.
Redhat wouldn't even install, it kept looking at hdd when the cdrom that it
booted from was in hdc. When I finally got pissed, I burned another copy and
put 1 copy of cd #1 in each, it got to past the language selection, and then
promptly hung. Verified the iso checksums and gave up, went to download
slackware. 
Also had some bread errors before it hung. 

Slackware installed, seemed to work fine, although on startup I get
different variations of about 20 uhci errors followed by the helpful comment
"very bad". Still, slackware booted, I could login, launch gnome or kde,
play with the gimp and nibbles. No problems. 

That is, until I tried create a new fat partition out of free space on the
drive. Created, changed type, but when I tried to write the change to the
drive, it came back with the error, unable to read partition information,
etc. Cussed, reboot, checked fdisk - partition was "created" (and in the
right place apparently, I didn't overwrite another partition). I formatted
it, began to copy some stuff into the new partition. A couple minutes later,
a kernel panic (with blinking keyboard lights even) and when I reboot, all
the partition info was scrambled. Lilo came up, the penguin shows, and then
the kernel panic when trying to load the root file system. It was reiser_fs
if that has any bearing. 
I tried a couple of recovery tools, but nothing could recover the data on
any of the partitions. I took a look at the new partition (hex) I had made
at the end of the disk and LILO "stuff" showed up right at the beginning.
Normal? I don't think so, perhaps on the boot / active partition, but I
don't see why it would be on a partition w/o an os. 
Anyways, I'm confused, I even opened up a can of air on the case and
reseated ram and the vid card. 
Any ideas?

Everything points to hardware, but the damndest thing is I haven't seen any
problems under windows. . .






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