diagnosing possible hardware problem
Constantine Evans
constantine at evanslabs.org
Sat Oct 14 00:24:16 UTC 2006
I apologise for so many people here not understanding your method of
installation. The standard way of installing Ubuntu is with a CD, and it
appears that many people don't know about network based installs. Which
is a pity, because they are very nice, especially since they don't
require a CD, and are so flexible.
Felix Miata wrote:
> I've been having all kinds of strange problems installing and using ubuntu
> and its various desktop flavors on 3 i440BX systems for over a week and a
> half. Most of the problems seem to be connected to one of the 3 HDs I've
> used, even though I've run the Seatools diagnostic program on it, which
> claims there is no problem with the device. A new 80 pin cable changed
> nothing. I've also run memtest86+ for over 8 hours without errors. The
> various errors include, but are not limited to:
>
> installer packaging errors
> installer can't find kernel to install
> apt-get/dpkg errors (e.g. tarfile corruption)
> file not found errors
> CRC errors
All of those really point toward the hard drive. I wouldn't trust the
diagnostic program - have you tried running badblocks on the drive?
> I was not able to get a working installation without using the installation
> kernel parameters acpi=off and ide=nodma. I haven't been able to find any
> clues in /var/log anywhere, but I tend to think most of the errors are (old)
> hardware compatibility issues with their main root in the Seagate HD.
acpi=off is probably required because a systems probably don't have
ACPI, and nodma is quite possibly a similar issue. How old are these,
and what are there specs?
> Right now I have the Xubuntu desktop running, and booted on acpi=off and
> noapic kernel parameters. Is there something already installed or that I can
> apt-get that will rigorously test the hardware and report any errors it
> finds? Is there one particular situation that results in CRC errors?
>
> TIA
Badblocks for the hard drive. memtest for the memory. But it really
sounds like the hard drive, in which case badblocks should be what you
need. I wouldn't try to use the drive by disabling the blocks that
badblocks reports as bad though - this generally results in catastrophic
failure eventually (though it might take longer with older drives).
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