[SOLVED] Mageia 1/2 does not install or boot

[linuxero]

Hi;

I wanted to try Mageia 2 Alpha 2 on a Packard Bell laptop Intel Celeron M520 @1.60 with a bit less than 1 MB RAM, 80 GB hard disk, ati graphics...

Windows Vista and Xp install, boot and work perfectly.

Mageia Live does not make it to log in. I tried installing but to no vail.
Mageia 2 64bit installs but does not boot. the screen flips things rapidly then it gets stuck saying:


Failed to allocate:
Size: 4096000 bytes
Alignment: 0 bytes
Domains: 2
Could not log bootup: Address already in use


Mageia 1 32bit, boots until the KDE login screen but can never log in.

Mageia live cannot boot

So, I tried with Fedora 16; failed too but it said something about synaptics, acpi claims to have advance options but I can't find them. Don't ask me for the original message please unless it is necessary.

KahelOS 111111 i686 boots good enough but I noticed that udev is having problems.

OpenSuse 12.1, Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot, Centos 6.1, gparted: all fail at some point

The only two distros that booted well enough are systemrescuecd 1.2.2, an old one , and Ubuntu 9.04. But then two USB ports wouldn't work.

Through Ubuntu live I copied the /var/log folder of Mageia 1 32bit but the boot.log is empty!!

Any idea guys?

[doktor5000]

Have you tried booting Mageia 1/2 installs in failsafe mode? From there, run drakx11 and select vesa graphics driver, should allow you to boot.

[linuxero]

Have you tried booting Mageia 1/2 installs in failsafe mode? From there, run drakx11 and select vesa graphics driver, should allow you to boot.

Yes I have. Sorry I forgot to mentione that. But it could not boot even in failsafe mode!!

[PiElle]

Maybe you have more than four primary partitions?

[linuxero]

Maybe you have more than four primary partitions?

Thanks for the suggestion, but I did the partitioning using MGA Installer as this:

/dev/sda1 ~37GB EXT4
/dev/sda2 ~39GB EXT4
/dev/sda3 ~1.7GB SWAP


Besides;I am only using /dev/sda1 as / for my installation

Obviously I only have 3 partitions all of which are primary. Anyway; I would never imagine a distro to hang up for an error in the partition scheme without pointing it out and possibly try to live with it

[PiElle]

Did you try to upgrade the computer's BIOS?

[linuxero]

Did you try to upgrade the computer's BIOS?

Well now that is something..

Actually I have been trying to find the support site for this model for more than 2 weeks now and no hope. Maybe you can help!

Packard Bell Easynote
Model: ARGO C
MS-Model: ARGS1 IN0054

I tried Packard Bell's site but I could not find the model!

[linuxero]

Still no hope. The only distro that I could install is Sidux.

Now I am pretty sure it is a UDEV problem. Something is driving udev mad!!

[JoesCat]

Since you mentioned that Ubuntu 9.04 works (except for 2 USB ports), you may want to drop into the command line and see what udev reports back.

BIOS would be a good candidate to ensure is up-to-date, but otherwise you could probably try options with ACPI and other power handling features turned-off to see if it gets past a certain hurdle (if it happens to be a problem).

[linuxero]

BIOS would be a good candidate to ensure is up-to-date, but otherwise you could probably try options with ACPI and other power handling features turned-off to see if it gets past a certain hurdle (if it happens to be a problem).

Well; I've tried with the BIOS to no avail. The thing is with all the distros reaching a point where udev is running, the system dies right there! At last, Debian seems to work for a few minutes then it hangs and starts responding at intervals or just dies. Mageia 32bit could just pass the login screen once and died there.

[doktor5000]

Did you try any of the commonly used kernel boot options to see if there's an improvement?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootO ... el_Options

Common ones to try at least would be (only try one at a time for a start)
acpi=off, acpi=noirq, acpi=ht, noapic, nolapic, acpi_osi=linux
and as you mentioned udev problems, also try with clocksource=jiffies.

For reference, here's one bugreport against the kernel i did a while ago with an older laptop,
which took me quite some time to diagnose and workaround: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11727
Maybe check the description for some other boot options.

[linuxero]

@doktot5000 thank you, I'll give it a shot as I only tried with noacpi so I'll check the rest.

[linuxero]

Solved using kernel option nohz=off, however it has some hangs every 5-7 seconds, so I tried both nohz=off and noacpi and it works now

Thanks