[CentOS] Odd installation hang.

Mon Mar 27 21:35:27 UTC 2006
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

For the archives:

I had an odd installation hang on an older Athlon MB; KT133 I believe.

SuSE 10.0 and Fedora Core 5 installers ran fine; CentOS 4.2 and 4.3 hung with 
the last line on the screen referencing running /sbin/loader (or is 
that /sbin/installer....don't typically see it enough to remember); the 
cursor froze at that point.  SuSE 10.0 successfully installed on this box.

After trying all the normal tricks, like turning ACPI off, using the BIOS IRQ 
table, etc, I noticed that the FC5 installer mentioned something about 
disabling IRQ6.  IRQ6?!?  That's the floppy controller; but there's no floppy 
drive configured or cabled.  Hmmm.... no place in the BIOS to disable the 
floppy controller ?!?  Ok, let's tell it it has a 3.5 1.44MB floppy (even 
though it doesn't!), and not to stop on floppy errors.  

Lo and behold, that fixed the hang.  Something in the CentOS 4 installer that 
runs right after /sbin/loader was hanging, unless it had a floppy out there, 
even when there was no floppy out there.

But, and I repeat, SuSE 10.0 installed flawlessly, and the FC5 installer came 
up fine.  But the CentOS 4 installer did not until I told the BIOS to lie 
about having a floppy.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu