Need help installing linux on an HP laptop

[John Kohler]

Dear ME,
Thank you for your reply.  I am not advanced enough to understand all of 
your discussion.

However, I have found and tried a boot parameter that can be passed to 
the kernel (now using Red Hat 7.3) at start-up time  from the hard disk 
loading process:

boot: linux nomce

I understand that possibly the kernel panic shown below is not a "fatal" 
one and can be
avoided by adding the above command to the kernel to ignore minor 
Machine Checks.

I am concerned that I am too heavily disabling the kernel.  First, 
during installation,

boot: linux nopcmcia

and second, as shown above.

With these tactics, I can complete the boot proces, get to a user prompt 
and/or a root prompt, where I can login at either level. After that, I 
am successful with "startx" and the current of GNOME   begins successfully.

Now, I am facing the same challenge that I did with my first attempt 
using an NIC and trying to activate the "eth0" LAN interface.

I am seeing the familiar "network unreachable" on the command-line 
responses.

Thanks again for your response and discussion below.

John

ME wrote:

>John Kohler said:
>  
>
>>Hello Everybody,
>>
>>I appreciate all your help when I installed Red Hat on my Desktop PC
>>several years ago.
>>
>>I just got an HP laptop, and have new challenges:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>I am using Red Hat 7.2 linux.
>>>
>>>This is an HP pavilion ze4101.
>>>
>>>I formatted the hard drive when I received it. I selected from the
>>>BIOS menu the option to load from the CD ROM drive, and when given the
>>> boot prompt: I passed the "no pcmcia" value to the installer kernel.
>>>
>>>The graphic installation proceeded well, and I chose all the default
>>>options during the installation, except the option to create a boot
>>>disk as the laptop has no floppy drive.
>>>
>>>Upon restart, the kernel reports its prgress on the laptop screen as
>>>follows:
>>>
>>>296k init, 0k highmem
>>>
>>>Dentry cache hash table entries: 16384 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
>>>Inode cache hash table entries:8192 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)
>>>Mount-cache hash table enties: 2048 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)
>>>Buffer cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)
>>>Page-cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
>>>CPU: L1 I cache: 64K (64 bytes/line, D cache 64K (64 bytes/line) CPU:
>>>L2 Cache: 256K(64 bytes/line)
>>>Intel machine check architecture supported.
>>>Intel machine check reporting enabled on CPU#0.
>>>CPU: AMD mobile AMD Athlon (tm) SP 1500+ stepping 00
>>>Enabling fast FPU save and restore... done.
>>>Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.
>>>POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
>>>mtrr: v1.40 (20010327) Richard Gooch (rgooch at atnf.csiro.au)
>>>mtrr: detected mtrr type: Intel
>>>PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at Oxfd87b, last bus=2
>>>PCI: Using configuration type 1
>>>PCI: Probing PCI hardware
>>>PCI: Using IRQ router ALI [10b9/1533] at 00:07.0
>>>isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...
>>>CPU 0: Machine Check Exception: 0000000000000007
>>>Bank 3: b40000000000083b at 00000001fc0003b3
>>>Kernel panic: Unable to continue
>>>      
>>>
>>Any Ideas?
>>
>>John Kohler
>>Daly City, CA
>>    
>>
>
>Eject all pcmcia cards.
>In BIOS settings disable all non-essential hardware (such as USB).
>Try rebooting again.
>
>If still fails, and report is accurate, look in /etc/rc?.d to see what
>starts after isapnp script (you may need to grep for this word in these
>dirs and/or /etc/init.d (or where rh puts its startup scripts.)
>
>Temporarily disable the startup script that runs through the "pcmcia" card
>services (if any) and if not, then disable isapnp and the service that
>immediately follows it by number (higher numbers in /etc/rc?.d/ links that
>start with "S" are started as listed from low to high.
>
>(isapnp and pcmcia-cs are suspect from where I sit in the data provided.
>If neither of these, then the started service immediately after isapnp.)
>
>This kind of message seems to happen in HP Laptops that have certain
>(non-standard) ranges of memory BIOS that should be probed while probing
>the "standard ones" can lead to the above problems when the hardware using
>the "standard address" does not behave as it should, oras the kernel would
>expect it to.
>
>Fixes often include bypassing the probing done by pcmcia-cs and/or isapnp
>by skipping these at startup (edit the associated scripts in single user
>mode to not start (simple "exit 0" near the top of the startup script
>should work), save, sync and reboot.
>
>If you can reboot, then try to isolate which one is causing the failure.
>copy the script to a new file, edit out the "exit 0" and rtun the copy as
>root. If the kernel bails again, you have found a cause.
>
>If pcmcia-cs, then uninstall pcmcia-cs and install the latest pcmcia-cs. I
>the latest package available is still busted, you can get and compile your
>own from source at sourceforge.
>
>If that does not work, you can try to locate the range of BIOS that
>*should* be scanned and make sure the pcmcia config files include those as
>resources to scan and remove other bios ranges that should not be.
>
>If this is PCMCIA-CS, I worked with coders on sourceforge way back when
>with it as a bug report and worked through a fix for the HP laptop we were
>using. After the fix was in place, all new pcmcia-cs from sourceforge
>worked great with the laptop.
>
>For my part int he fix, I actually installed MS Windows and found the
>ranges of memory used by PCMCIA PCI bridge, and explicitly told the
>pcmcia-cs to only use these ranges and no others. Other chnages were
>required too (I dont recall them all) but they all related to limitingthe
>resources probed by pcmica-cs on startup. This part is a bit of work, so
>try other ideas first.
>
>Please let us know if you have questions about any parts listed above or
>need anything described in more detail. :-)
>
>Followup on success/failure, and partial success is great. Your documented
>and included description of the problem is very good and includes what is
>needed to start to fix this.
>
>-ME
>
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