I got cramfs!!!

[rhw007]

Ok...I got a big ol 1075 page doorstop thingy called Red Hat Linux 7.3 Bible and 3 CD roms I plan on using as coasters because I can't get Linux to install after many hours today trying all sorts of configurations and BIOS re-sets and a host of other issues. The book is great probably IF I could get the software to go past crc errors, invalid compressed format errors, kernal panics and such that I myself am beginning to panic when upon re-booting back to windows 98v2 the CPU bus is a piece of new hardware that the OS goes off searching for drivers for it!!! ( Thank creation and Billy G that it finds them ! :) )

I have 2 80GB hds with win98 on the first, and the second is free for unix. I even tried formating D, resetting jumpers to be master, took out C and tried the boot instal proccess to a freshly sectored Maxtor 80 GB HD. I even tried partitioning it into 33Gb and 47GB chunks.

Tried lowres, text install and am stuck. I need one drive as Linux and cant seem to get linux to install. Ideas. Be back...

[CrashTestDummy9]

What kind of hardware do you have in your box ? I also have RedHat 7.3 and I dual boot with Win XP . I wouldnt use that 50.00 book as a doorstop just yet . There are ppl here who can help . It may not be me , but then again it might be .

[rhw007]

Sorry, my wife is in wheelchair and had to put her to bed.

I have the systems resource printed out so anything needed from there I have at my fingertips.

THANX for the help any and all who can.

I have a 740MHZ ( I think) AMD Athlon with 128MB RAM

Cable modem with realtek PCI ethernet card
Rage Fury Pro2000 video card
wheel mouse and standard other stuff.

It seemed to go along well in lowres mode once until I hit ramdisk:

Ext2-fs:unable to read superblock
cramfs: wrong magic
Fat: unable to read boot sector
Kernal panic VFS: unable to mount root fs on 09:00

and system halted.

And there I am .

got bad woobie-joobie magic. :(

[rhw007]

I have been following the other newbie install thread too today and already tried the PowerManagement trick in BIOS by turning that off. didnt help.

inifrd.img is the first prg that takes awhile to load...
then vmlinuz starts if it doesnt crc error.

I have downloaded and ran belarc:

Windows 98 (build 4.10.1998) System Manufacturer Product Name SYS-xxxxxx Processor a Main Circuit Board 700 megahertz AMD Athlon
32 kilobyte primary memory cache
256 kilobyte secondary memory cache Board: First International Computer, Inc. AZ11 PCB 1.X
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
BIOS: Award Software International, Inc. 6.00 PG 06/26/2000 Drives Memory Modules 163.87 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
159.63 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

ATAPI CD-ROM
HP CD-Writer+ 8200 [CD-ROM drive]
Generic floppy disk drive (3.5")

Maxtor 4D080H4 (81.96 GB) [Hard drive] -- drive 0
Maxtor 4D080H4 (81.96 GB) [Hard drive] -- drive 1 128 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot 'DIMM1' has 128 MB
Slot 'DIMM2' is Empty
Slot 'DIMM3' is Empty Local Drive Volumes

c: (on drive 0) 81.94 GB 77.70 GB free
d: (on drive 1) 19.53 GB 19.53 GB free
e: (on drive 1) 62.41 GB 62.41 GB free

[CrashTestDummy9]

All of your hardware looks fine . I dont have any experience with book provided install CDs but the 7.3 ISOs I downloaded from http://www.linuxiso.org worked fine for me . At the risk of sounding like im brushing you off , which im not , it sounds like bad CDs . Give it about an hour and see if somebody else responds with an opinion . I dont think its anything to do with your hardware though . Sorry I couldnt be more helpful .

[rhw007]

I tried a 16mb file as I dont have time for a 6 hour download per CD for some of the others at that link. I DO have cable modem bu the feed site for some cant take advantage of the the fast speed cable has for some bandwidth reason on their end. I have down loaded FAST before well over 100/

The 16mb file seemed to go okay until it got into the # technical stuff which I am so new as to not even know where to look to find what I need to do with each one, though I am plowing through the book and the redhat site's pdfs which is why I am not 'live' in this thread for last half hour or so.

I don't think its the CDs because I have gotten to different points in the install depending on the bios settings and also when freshly formatting the D to nothing and only one partitiion with nothing but command.com on it.

I have only 3 things I need linux to do. Install. run one pieces of USGS software after pulling the data qubes for it from the ASU ftp site over the cable modem, and then allow me to write the USGS output files to the CD burner for safekeeping and transport to the windows side of things. period. No site servers, so network workshorse, no print servers.

Install...get data from web and run on USGS Linux software and write USGS output to the HP Cd writer. anything else I truly lack the time to explore.

anyone else have any other ideas for me I hope?

Thanx in advance. I'll hang here for a bit with this browser window open and check back frequently.
Thanx.

[mdwatts]

Have you tried the Redhat support site to see if others have reported the same or similiar problems with the installation?

It could be a hardware problems such as bad memory. That would cause the crc errors.

Linux is not as forgiving as Windows when it comes to iffy hardware.

Are you sure you have ALL power management disabled in the bios? All drives detected and configured in the bios?

[hess75]

I have seen this same error when trying to install Red Hat 7.3.
Has anyone found a solution or workaround?

Any ideas would be appreciated.

[Hayl]

hess75 have you tried disabling plug 'n' play in the bios yet?

[hess75]

no i have not tried disabling the plug and play. This is on a PIII that I have at my desk at work.
I will try that first thing in the morning.

This is something that I must get resolved tomorrow by noon.

Do you think it is possible that I might have a corrupted download or a bad burn? I am getting the exact same errors as mentioned above.

[Hayl]

im not sure but i will say that when i used to run rh 7.3 i would occasionally get a kernel panic when starting up my system and when i rebooted it would go away. i have not had it happen to me on an install tho.

[hess75]

well, i started another download of the ISO images when I left work, so I can re-burn and try another set of disks in the morning if it comes to that.
I will try to turn off the Plug and Play and see where that takes me.

I appreciate the quick response.

I will post again in the morning as to what has or hasn't worked.

[mdwatts]

Disabling power management in the bios has been known to fix the "Kernal panic VFS: unable to mount root fs on 09:00" problem.

[hess75]

evidently it was decided to go ahead and put redhat 7.2 on the machine and that seemed to work right away.

i am not trying to put redhat 7.3 on a cPCI One Stop System through a SCSI cdrom drive and am now experiencing signal 11 errors.

have looked at the http://www.bitwizard.nl/sig11/
website about such errors and am trying various things.
am reburning the new cd's now and hopefully that will clear things up.

[hess75]

I re-burned some new install disks and everything seemed to install correctly.

I have not gotten a chance to re-install on the other machine getting the kernal panic and cramfs errors, however I suspect that it might have been due to the bad install disks I was trying to use.

Thanks for all the help.