Installed Fedora 7, wish I had not, hangs all the time [Was: Re: Fedora 7 install hung [Was: Re: Fedora 7 CD iso files?]]

[Philip Walden]

Philip Walden wrote:
> Philip Walden wrote:
>> Philip Walden wrote:
>>> Timothy Murphy wrote:
>>>> Philip Walden wrote:
>>>>
>>>>  
>>>>> Restarted and this time I got several hours into the install to "5 of
>>>>> 864 completed Installing glibc-common - 2.6-3.i386". Same thing, 
>>>>> no disk
>>>>> activity, the cursor would not track and the spinning wait cursor 
>>>>> froze.
>>>>>
>>>>> At this point I suspect my original FC6 is busted. Any suggestions
>>>>> before I start with a complete, from scratch including disk reformat?
>>>>>     
>>>>
>>>> Well, is FC-6 "busted" or not?
>>>> I mean, will the system re-boot?
>>>>
>>>> My experience is that if an upgrade fails
>>>> the system usually runs OK.
>>>>
>>>> I had at least 3 failures like this while upgrading an Athlon-64 
>>>> machine,
>>>> and it seems to run fine.
>>>>   
>>> You are right, I was able to reboot on the original FC6 install. 
>>> Sorry it was late and I just tried it today. I have never had a 
>>> install problem before, so I had no idea what the result was going 
>>> to be.
>>>
>>> I guess I am being a gluten for punishment, I tried again. This time 
>>> it stuck quickly at the "Checking dependencies" again.
>>>
>>> I am not installing on a weird system, I think. It's a older i386 HP 
>>> OB6000 laptop. I had no problems installing  FC4, and upgrading to 
>>> FC5 and FC6 on this system.
>>>
>>> This is the first time I have had to try the http source install as 
>>> this thing's DVD-ROM will not recognize my DVD+R or DVD-R disks. 
>>> Could the http sourcing cause this problem? Should I just keep 
>>> trying until I get it going? The previous run was about 4-5 hours 
>>> into the install when it hung.
>> So I tried again. This time I am stuck. I insert the boot disk. When 
>> I get to the specify http source screen and press ok, it displays a 
>> loading image message and then the screen scrolls over with garbage 
>> text (looking like Russian cryllic) and stops. I try again, same 
>> thing. I unmount and remount the iso on the http server, and try 
>> again. Now I get the Russian text after selecting the Install or 
>> upgrade option in the Welcome to Fedora screen, nevermind selecting 
>> the language, keyboard and http source.
>>
>> I try again, this time no Russian, but it hangs on "Running anaconda".
>>
>> Looks like FC7 just does not like this box. I can't be a hardware 
>> failure, as I can use this thing "until the cows come home" with FC6.
> One last time, and now it dies loading the image from the http source. 
> The paints with a call trace dump and the following text at the end.
>
> "BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 8b397507
>  printing eip:
> c0406643
> *pde = 00000000
> Recursive die() failure, output suppressed"
So I gave up on the upgrade and went for the disk format and install. At 
least this went smoothly to completion.

One point, though, during the early period of the install, the installer 
warned about low memory and needing to overlay the swap. So I assumed 
the upgrade was not smart enough to use swap properly.

However, now that I am installed, I get frequent system hangs at various 
points: during boot, after user login, running applications. It never 
lasts longer than a few minutes.