new user with fc8 problem onDell 530s

Peter Lovell plovell at mac.com
Tue Jul 8 19:35:50 UTC 2008


Hi all,
new user here with a problem on Fedora 8. Also fc 9 but that might or
might not be the same.

I'm using fc 8 because some work-things want that version.

Background
----------
I have a Dell Vostro 530s. This is the same as the Inspiron 530s, just
the "small business" version rather than "home. It's a no-legacy
machine, so SATA hard drive and DVD, no floppy, no PS/2 keyboard+mouse
(USB only). The system is exactly stock except I have a different SATA
drive in it.

Problem
-------
Various Linux distros won't boot, failing in various ways. After some
coaxing, I have managed to get some working OK and thought this list-
post might spark some suggestions.

Fedora-8-i386-DVD.iso    will not boot. It starts but then hangs with
the installer message "Loading ata_piix driver" on screen

Fedora-9-i386-DVD.iso    boots and installs. But the system hangs as
above when it boots

Fedora-8-Live-i686.iso   yay -- boots and installs. Everything seems
fine. System is 2.6.23.1-42.fc8   Then I install the available updates
and it hangs  upon restart. System is now 2.6.25.9-40.fc8.  So I use
grub to try to boot the old kernel and it works fine.

I notice messages under 25 (2.6.25.9) that weren't there with 23
(2.6.23.9). In particular, 25 was unhappy with two USB devices (I guess
these are the keyboard and the mouse, since that's all that there is
connected). Also, it doesn't like IRQ 19 and disabled it. The dmesg info
under 23 suggests that's part of USB.

When I was using Ubuntu on this system (which also had similar problems
but was able to work) there were a number of list messages about a race
condition loading USB and SATA drivers. This would fit with the symptoms
I see. The solution with Ubuntu was to add "all_generic_ide" to the grub
boot parameters. I tried that with fc8 but it didn't help -- maybe the
option is different?

So, there seems to be some change between 2.6.23 and 2.6.25 to cause
this problem.

I haven't filed a bugzilla bug yet but will do so when there's a bit
more info about the cause.




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