Need help installing linux on an HP laptop

ME dugan at passwall.com
Thu Nov 7 08:22:30 PST 2002


It is possible that the NIC is one of the devices that is not being probed
by the OS during startup.

Things to check:
after booting, log in as root and type:
# ifconfig eth0
if you get nothing, then there is no diriver loaded/associated with the
hardware.

if you see something, then please report what you see.

Also, are you sure you only have one NIC? To make sure the OS is only
seeing one NIC you may also want to try:
# ifconfig eth1
(No need to try this if the first ifcoinfig fot eth0 gives you nothing)

Is the NIC (Network Interface Card) an actual card (PCMCIA) or integrated

If the ifconfig do not show info about your NIC(s), then as root, try
# lspci
If the NIC is integrated, one of the items listed will likely be it.
If the NIC is pcmcia, then you will likely need pcmcia-cs running before
it will work, and we can look into that later...

also, after you boot your machine with:
boot: linux nomce
can you check to see if the pcmcia-cs is running?

# ps -auxw | grep "cardmgr"
If you see something like:

root       287  0.0  0.1  1392  636 ?        S    Nov06   0:00
/sbin/cardmgr -C config-2.4

 after using the "nomce" that may be a good sign.

Thanks!
-ME

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John Kohler said:
> 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
>>
>>-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
>>Version: 3.12
>>GCS/CM$/IT$/LS$/S/O$ !d--(  ) !s !a   (-----) C  $(    ) U    $( $) P
>> $>
>> L   $(  ) E W   $( ) N  o K w $>  >    O-@ M $ V-$>- !PS
>>!PE Y  PGP   t at -(  ) 5 @ X@ R- tv- b   DI D  G--@ e >  >     h(  )>
>> r*>? z? ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
>>decode: http://www.ebb.org/ungeek/ about:
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>






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