Need help installing linux on an HP laptop

ME dugan at passwall.com
Mon Nov 4 20:17:32 PST 2002


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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