[TAG] Hangs, crashes and failures with Fedora Core 2's installer

[Ben Okopnik]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 04:09:41PM +0100, Bradley Chapman wrote:
> Mr. Ben,

(Folks, he's at it again. Somebody go get the wet noodle, or whatever it
is we're using to beat people with these days.)

> On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 09:49:13 -0400, Ben Okopnik <ben at callahans.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Can't say that I'm an expert on Fedora, but it sounds like it's hanging
> > when you get to the part where you're doing heavy disk I/O. I'd take a
> > careful look at the BIOS - "LBA" settings have been known to cause this
> > sort of problems in the past.
> 
> I thought much the same thing, only the part which confuses me is why
> the 2.6.5 custom kernel
> used with the FC2 installer (and for that matter, the 2.4.22 custom
> kernel with FC1's installer) hangs during heavy disk I/O, while the
> vanilla 2.6.7 kernel I originally had installed into my RH9
> installation didn't burp in the slightest.

How about solving one problem at a time, Brad? If you're really
concerned with the above "why", then you could join the
kernel-developers list, learn C _really really_ well, dig into the
diffs, run a bunch of properly-designed experiments, and report the
results. I suspect you're actually not that interested - and my guess is
that no one else is either. Isn't the point here to get the system
_working?_ Given how often new kernels/patches are available, this
particular "why" isn't really a worthwhile question, IMO.

> Anyway, my laptop BIOS is a Phoenix BIOS - any pointers on what I
> could try to look for and modify? It talks about things like "Large
> Disk Access Mode" and says that some UNIX systems need that modified,
> but I don't want to mess my XP installation yp (since it's my only
> remaining OS on this machine).

I'm missing your point WRT your "only remaining OS". What, once you lose
it, you'll never get it back? If you've been backing up your data, then
even if something does happen (which I doubt), you'll be fine.

Long Block Addressing is a method the HD controllers used to use in
order to access data in partitions greater than 504MB; Linux, Novell,
etc. are all smart enough to do their own geometry translation, and
don't need the extra help.

AFAIK, Wind0ws shouldn't have a problem - but that's not a guarantee.
Micr0s0ft's KnowledgeBase says nothing about reformatting when switching
- but that's no guarantee of anything either. The only thing I can tell
you is that I've done this, oh, probably half a dozen times in the last
5 or 6 years, and haven't seen a problem.


* Ben Okopnik * okopnik.freeshell.org * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette *
-*- See the Linux Gazette in its new home: <http://linuxgazette.net> -*-