On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, Phil Meyer wrote:
Justin Zygmont wrote:
why is it always me who has these problems.. I guess that would explain
why there aren't any bugs reported about it. Anyone have an idea how to
track down the problem?
thanks,
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Justin Zygmont wrote:
I want to post this message one more time since no one replied to it.
Has anyone experienced problems with FC4 right after the third ISO gets
mounted when doing an NFS install? I'd like to try to find the problem,
but not exactly sure yet, how. Any replies would be useful.
In every case that I have seen this type of thing, where the system bombs
during the install of packages, the issue is one of two things:
1. Bad media (already discussed)
2. Bad or mismatched memory
If the system has more than one memory stick, you may be seeing the classic
problem of a bad or mismatched second stick. It works great until the system
pages in allot of files. In that case, the size of the memory sticks
determines where it crashes.
With a pair of 256MB sticks, you might not see trouble until disk 2 or three,
depending on how many packages are being installed.
With a pair of 512MB sticks, you may not see the problem until near the end,
or maybe not at all until you try to run the system a while.
In any case, its worthwhile to try memcheck86 or simply remove a stick (if
you can) and try it again with just one stick. memcheck86 may not help with
mismatched memory.
The 2.6 Linux kernel will try to use the full potential of your mother board,
and is sensitive to memory timings on most newer chip sets.
In some cases, I have been able to step the timing down on mismatched (or
cheap) memory to make it work.
The Linux kernel, unlike the Windows kernel, uses all available memory on
demand and does not release it (generally) unless it has to. That means that
you can look at an idle UNIX/Linux system and see memory maxed out. It can
sit there for days with 93% memory utilized. That simply means that it had
at one time utilized all that memory for applications and disk cache and
whatever.
So in a PC with 2 256MB sticks, and the second one is bad/mismatched, Windows
can run just fine for weeks until you run something that pushes you over the
256MB limit and then it will start to cause problems. It may even continue
to run and just act a bit weird.
However, Linux on that same system will almost always utilize more than 256MB
just booting up, because it does not release disk cache unless it needs to.
So Linux on our PC with the bad/mismatched second stick, will likely crash
coming up, and will most certainly crash during an install.
thanks, but I have been running core 3 on this machine for a long time,
and everything else runs fine too, including memtest86. I'll try removing
a stick anyway to see if that can help. I don;t think it may be going
over 128MB though, even in text mode which only requires 64MB, it reboots
itself right after the third ISO.
