Subject: Re: help with hard ware
From: civileme (civileme@mandrakesoft.com)
Date: Tue Jan 22 2002 - 11:40:40 AKST
On Monday 21 January 2002 09:35 pm, Jeremy Hodder wrote:
> I have a amd 586 that I'm having trouble with. I can get redhat 5.1 to
> install. on reboot I get kernel panic or it locks up after 'hlt'. I'm
> thinking it the hardware does any one know how I can test this system. By
> the way I can get win98 to run on it.
>
> Jeremy
> " I was the kid next door's imaginary friend. "
Well, if it runs 98 but locks up on RH a number of things come to mind, but
the first is memory.
Any recent Mandrake CD has memtest-x86.bin in its /images directory. Rawrite
that to floppy with windows/dos or dd it to floppy with linux and you have a
bootable memory tester which does a thorough job.
Windows, you see, does not often use the upper mid section of memory--users
have been "trained" to reboot when system resources run low. Linux on the
other hand operates on the belief that unused memory is wasted memory. On my
512Mb box I have 3Mb free, the rest is soaked up in cache and buffers and
shared areas--If I initiate a new peogram, some cache or buffer is converted
as needed.
So bad memory will often not affect a Winsystem or if it does it is so close
to the ordinary behavior of windows that no one will notice. And it will
almost always affect a linux system right away.
I do have Mandrake 5.3 which also uses a 2.0.x kernel if you need to check
something against your CD (which is almost always the other weak point--media
and drive).
Civileme
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