Hang ups on first boot -- RedHat 9

[kew26]

Have been having some puzzling troubles with a Compaq Presario 800 laptop that I am trying to salvage...

Successfully installed RedHat but cannot boot--hangs after either "hda: attached ide-disk driver" or, arbitrarily makes it past that but then hangs on "freeing unused kernel memory: 164k freed"

I tried to remedy with boot options "noapic", "nomce", and "nodma" but have had no success.

Any thoughts on how to fix?

[Void Main]

Just for grins, add all these kernel params at boot:

noathlon nobiospnp pci=biosirq ide=nodma nomce idebus=66 nousb

[kew26]

Thanks for the tips!

Those got me further but now it's hanging at the line "finding module dependencies"

Any other thoughts?

[Void Main]

Have you thought about installing a more current distro?

[kew26]

Forgive me, I'm a newbie--distro?

[kew26]

Ahh nevermind...I understand you and also realize I misspoke, I am using RH Enterprise

[Void Main]

I'm sorry distro usually refers to "distribution". For instance, there are three Red Hat distributions more recent than Red Hat 9. Fedora Core 1, 2, and now 3. Each one having a newer kernel with more hardware support than the previous.

[Calum]

but unless the hardware is newer than the system, is this likely to be a problem? what hardware does that machine have inside it anyway that might cause this?

the reason i pipe up with this is that if it's a compaq, it should be old enough that red hat 9 will cope fine with the hardware, surely? also because i am an RH9 die hard!

[Ice9]

He's running RH enterprise.

Now, unless he's running Enterprise 2.1 his kernel is based on the RH9 kernel plus a few modifications.

[kew26]

Spent a long time debugging on the phone with redhat to receive the sad answer that the problem is actually not software-related (still same problem after trying to install most recent version) but is most likely due to faulty hardware--processor might be fried. Not entirely shocking since I pronounced the thing dead a month ago (post mortem realized it had 46,000 viruses), I figured maybe a better OS would bring it back from the dead but no such luck.

Thanks for all the help though!

[Void Main]

I thought it sounded a little like a hardware problem since the problem didn't seem to happen at the exact same place every time. Bad memory would have been my guess though. You might try swapping your memory chips out, or if you have more than one, just switch them around and see if you notice different behavior.