Installation hangs on Packard Bell PIII

[allanric]

I am trying to install Fedora 4 on an old Packard Bell PIII 500MHz desktop. Installation hangs after displaying

PNP: no PS/2 controller found. Probing ports directly.

I have tried a number of boot options, including

noprobe
noapic
ide=nodma
nousb
acpi=off

but all to no avail. Can anyone help?

thanks

allanric

[madscientist]

I'm assuming you've tested the media checked out okay, yes? If so, have you tried installing in text mode? Does that give you the same result?

[allanric]

The media is a coverdisk from Linux Format magazine, and does not support mediacheck. Risk of a fault shold be fairly low I suppose, or others would have reported it?

I am not sure if I am installing in text mode or not. Sounds a bit stupid I know, but it is a command line interface, I am just not sure whether there there is an actual text mode that is different.

I will check.

[madscientist]

Well, I would imagine the installer transitions you to graphics mode by default. I believe you have to type "linux text" or some such thing to get into the text mode option. It would be interesting to know if the error is repeatable across these two installation modes.

I would imagine the magazine does some sort of check on the media before they ship, but the disc could have been damaged in transport. It would be worth trying another set of disks, if you can get your hands on some (either by ordering them for very little cost through http://www.blcds.com/ or by downloading and burning them yourself).

It also would be worth a shot trying one of the Live CDs (Knoppix, say) and see if you have any problems with it.

[allanric]

Text mode is no good either, I get exactly the same result.

Perhaps I should have mentioned that I have tried a number of distributions, and none of them have installed.

Thanks for the advice so far.

[madscientist]

Interesting. Has this computer run any other operating system (most likely Windows) successfully in the past? If all of the distributions complain about your PS/2 port, then your problem may be hardware related.

[pparks1]

I didn't actually realize that Packard Bell was in business long enough to market a Pentium3. In the early days, those guys did some really strange things. Getting Linux to run on a PBell may be more effort than it is worth.

[allanric]

It is currently running win98. It doesn't obviously stop at the same point with different distros. And yes it is beginning to feel like more trouble than it is worth!

[madscientist]

You could try typing "linux noapic" at the boot prompt during the installation routine and see if you get any further through the sequence.

[allanric]

Already tried that thanks, see original post for others.

regards

allanric

[TooSlow]

This may be a long shot, but try disabling all of the extra ports that you don't use (serial, parallel, even audio if you can) and try it again. Another option is to try unplugging the mouse (which will force you into text mode) and see if removing the mouse removes the conflict.