F10 live install Freeze

[whelm]

I just put together a Media computer based on Asus M3A78 PRO motherboard with AMD Phenom 8650 triple core running 2.3 GHz and 2 x 1G PC2=8500 memory. It has a Blue Ray burner and two Seagate 750 GB hard drives configured as BIOS / Hardware RAID 1. The board has integrated Radeon HD 3200 GPU driving an HDMI flat screen TV.

I was going to install F9, as I already have one, but found the ftp mirror I was using wasn't giving access to the F9 files, and in the process discovered F10 has been out for a while. Besides, this really should be a 64 bit version and my F9 was 32 bit.

I downloaded the 64 bit live CD image to a USB and booted from it. It boots fine. HOWEVER, just about any thing I try causes it to freeze. I've tried the install to hard disk app twice. The first time it give me a message about a kernel error before freezing. The second time it froze after the first disk partitioning information screen. Anything else I've tried freezes immediately upon launch.

I've run Knoptiks live Boot CD with no problem.

During the F10 boot it does say ata1 ata2 and ata6 failed - not ready. I'm not sure that's a problem, as ata1 and ata2 are the Raid drives and they don't have anything on them, and ata6 is the Blue Ray which had no disk in it. OTOH, I wasn't expecting it to see ata1 and ata2 as separate drives, but instead as a single RAID drive. When I had started to put 32 bit F9 on it from the minimal install CD, it saw the raid properly.

I have upgraded the BIOS to 0702 which is the current version. That fixed a problem configuring the RAID from the BIOS.

Any idea what is causing it to freeze or what to try?

Wilton

[whelm]

I haven't gotten any response to this in almost two weeks. Let me see if I can rephrase it so someone will give me a suggestion or two.

I have a F10 live image on a USB stick (64 bit). My computer boots it sucessfully, but locks up shortly afterward. My goal is to use it to install F10, but I can't get that far, and lock ups don't provide a lot of opportunity to ask questions. Since there is no R/W file system at that point, there aren't any log files to consult.

I'm not sure if this is an issue with the boot source USB
or the fact that I'm using Raid1
or the fact that it is 64 bit
or the presence of a blue ray writer optical drive
or using HDMI video
or something else entirely.

I have a 32 bit knoppix live boot CD and I can boot it in the blu ray drive, so I know some subset of the hardware is working.

Wilton

[TomasM]

Sorry Wilton - a few people I know have had this problem with all 64-bit distros (Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntoo, LinuxMint...) on particular hardware, and are yet to solve it. If you have internet quota and storage media to spare, you may want to check if a 32-bit F10 live distro works, to see if it really is a 64-bit problem.

If it is, try looking up your problem in a non-(Fedora specific) way, including general Linux forums and forums for other distributions. Changing kernel parameters or memory allocation (malloc) settings may help you.

Lastly, you may have grounds for filing a bug report.

Good luck,
-Tomas

[whelm]

Thanks for the reply. I downloaded F10 686 live CD iso and put it on a flashdrive.

It had the same problem. It boots just fine. I even looked at a web page using Firefox. But shortly thereafter, it indicates a kernel fault. The general nature of the fault was
list_del corruption. next->prev should be cl1d8018, but was 00000000

At that point, it actually still is working, but generally the next thing I try to do causes it to freeze.

So I guess I've ruled out 64 bit issues.

I also ruled out most of the HDMI issues, too, because I had taken the computer to another room and connected it to a VGA type monitor when I did this test.

Wilton

[whelm]

I am leaning towards the possibility that this is RAID related. If I understand correctly, the M3A78 has a BIOS RAID option (which I am trying to use as RAID 1) which I believe is what is referred to as FakeRaid. (The chip appears to be an AMD S8700 if that clears anything up).

I've been reading several threads and bug reports:

Some describe a bug in F10's handling of RAID, but the solutions offered involve stuff I don't understand, like adding patch files during the install or messing with mdadm, whatever that is.

Others indicate DON'T USE BIOS RAID, use software RAID. I'm not sure if that applies in this case and if so, why, or what performance differences are involved, or what if any relationship that has to the bug just mentioned. Some have indicated it is a non-solution for a dual boot with Windows situation, but that isn't an issue for me.

Some comments seem to be specific to upgrading. In this case I'm doing a clean install, so that would not matter.

I just need to know what I need to do to get F10 to install. Here are some pertinent details:

Two identical Seagate 750 GB SATA drives presently unformatted + an SATA Blue Ray R/W

Want drives to be RAID 1. Presently set up that way in BIOS, but could do other options if better.

This is for MythTV, and they don't recommend ext3 for media storage, so the largest partitions need to be JFS, which adds another wrinkle. I've considered pre-formatting/partitioning with fdisk or cfdisk, but haven't gotten that all figured out, yet--may depend on RAID issues, also.

64 bit AMD processor

I am trying to boot from Live CD on USB Flash drive, but could go another route if necessary

Any advise or clarification would be appreciated.

Wilton