**mayday**

[dacatzmeow]

I am having issues getting FC8 on my laptop. I have an HP dv6449us and I burnt FC8 to dvd as an .iso, just like normal. I stuck it in, booted, and I chose the first installation option. It read my specs in a dos-like screen and then the disk stopped spinning. I tried this 10 times and yields no results. I downloaded FC8 from HERE (http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/fedora.redhat/linux/releases/8/Fedora/i386/iso/). I dont know if this is a botched copy, but i am currently downloading it from Fedora's site. Does anyone know offhand of any problems with 8 on this system. I know of other people with a 6000 series having 8, so i dont see why mine should be any different. Thanks a bunch!

[stoat]

I dont know if this is a botched copy...Hello dacatzmeow,

There's an easy way to find out: check the SHA-1 hash from your downloaded file against the one in the file SHA1SUM available from the same place where you got your ISO. They must match exactly or else something is wrong with yours. If you don't know how to do it, go to the HOWTO (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=166240).

[glennzo]

Search this forum for info on the install hanging at /sbin/loader.

[dacatzmeow]

I typed in the commands that the post said to, and i waited...and waited...and waited, and still no results...BAH Help. SOS

[glennzo]

I had to wait a good 5 minutes when I installed Fedora 8 on my laptop. I was about to abort the whole thing but it suddenly continued. Were you trying command line options?

[dacatzmeow]

I pressed tab and typed floppy.allowed_drive_mask=0 clocksource=acpi_pm after the line that was already there. people said it worked, but didnt for me. I dont know if I am doing something wrong, or what. My computer is <4 months old so I shouldnt be having these issues with compatability.

[glennzo]

Have you had a look here? (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common#head-409d14862110b2b434dbea04fb29021bcfc209d0)

[bbfuller]

Hello dacatzmeow

If you are convinced that your dvd is good then you might like to try some of the things I had to do to get Fedora 8 installed on my HP/Compaq nx6125.

Firstly, although what I suggest later did get the install working, I never did get the DVD installation to go all the way. Although the DVD works quite happily on other machines. After the section where you are asked if you want to check the installation medium I just got a blue screen full of numbers.

In desperation I tried a livecd and although that also failed to boot I added:

acpi=off apm=off pci=noacpi

to the boot options line that you get when tapping tab.

For that laptop to work the acpi=off needs to remain after install which means that it doesn't automatically power off but I can live with that.

[dacatzmeow]

I tried all of these different commands and it isnt helping. The line that it hangs at reads:
..TIMER: vector=0x31 apic1=0 pin1=2 apic2=-1 pin2=-1

I added the acpi=off etc command and it progresses 3 commands farther reading:
…trying to set up timer (IRQ0) through the 8259A…
….(found pin 0)…failed
…trying to set up timer as virtual wire IRQ…failed.
…trying to set up timer as ExtINT IRQ…works…

That is the absolute farthest it will go.

[glennzo]

I wonder what 'pin' refers to.

[dacatzmeow]

I've also tried going into kernel and typing linux noprobe to bypass hardware detection, I've tried typing acpi=off in kernell, and neither of these worked neither.

[stoat]

Hello again dacatzmeow,

After trying all that stuff, just keep in your mind that sometimes these matters turn out to be disk related. I have seen posts where burning the image to a different brand of disk resulted in no problems. Sometimes burning at a slower speed helps. If you can, try your disk in another machine and see how far it gets. You can abort before it installs, but it might narrow it down to your disk or the drive trying to read it. Just some ideas if you get to the end of your rope.

[marko]

does it help to specify "noapic" with the other options suggested in post #8?

[bbfuller]

Hello dacatzmeow

Referring to the commands in my earlier post, for me they wouldn't work individually. It was necessary to have all three in combination, even though someone pointed out that one of acpi=off and pci=noacpi should contain the other. After install it only needs acpi=off.

Something to try maybe if you haven't already.

This business of acpi seems to be a regression to an earlier time as the problem originated about the time of fc5 but certainly didn't happen in fc6 and f7.

Harking back to those earlier times and marko's reference to 'noapic', there was another command that was reputed to be worth trying from that era, and that was 'nolapic'.

[dacatzmeow]

well, I downloaded a different copy of FC8, burned it, partitioned 20GB for a new drive, and am currently successfully loading 8 onto my PC. THanks A BUNCH, people, for helping me out. Nothing worked, really, except for a different copy of FC8 (thus far). Hopefully all continues to go well.

[stoat]

Nothing worked, really, except for a different copy of FC8 (thus far). Hello again dacatzmeow,

See? I tried to tell you that. But on the positive side, you are now the forum expert on kernel boot parameters. I don't even know what half of that stuff does.

[glennzo]

Hi dacatzmeow, yeah, you are now required to answer any and all questions pertaining to boot problems and what the command line parameters mean.

[priyadarshanh]

I have installed fc7 on this model. I had to pass the kernel parameters "acpi=off" and "noapic". After this everything went smoothly.

The problem with this are (in my system)
no battery monitor and no soft power down
ndiswrapper for wireless will not work
there may be other problems also.
I have not been able to use the inbuilt webcam,multimedia keys yet