[CentOS] CentOS 5.5/i386/32-bit CD installation hickups

Wed Jul 28 10:39:46 UTC 2010
John Doe <jdmls at yahoo.com>

> From: Boris Epstein <borepstein at gmail.com>

> > On  07/27/2010 11:18 AM, Boris Epstein wrote:
> >> I've got a few older 32-bit PC's that only  have a CD drive (no DVD).
> >> So I downloaded all the ISO's and I  thought I'd install CentOS 5.5 on
> >> this 1.25 GB P-3 (I think, don't  remember what CPU it's got right off
> >> hand, not that it should  matter). So I tried it there, got a fatal
> >> exception. OK, no problem  - thinking that maybe  something was wrong
> >> with that machine I  decided to try it on a different one, a P-3 with
> >> 384 MB or RAM. Same  thing happened.
> >> So here's my question: has anybody  successfully installed CentOS 5.5
> >> on a 32-bit machine (i386) using  individual CD's as their installation
> >>  media?
> By  the way - since it sounds like you have the experience - how easy
> is it to  mirror CentOS repositories locally? How much space do I  need,
> roughly?

I mirror it manualy (os from the DVDs and update with a simple rsync), although 
there is a createrepo package for mirroring repos.
My following repo (i386+x86_64) takes 12GB:
5/os/i386/CentOS
5/os/i386/repodata
5/os/i386/images
5/os/i386/images/pxeboot
5/os/i386/images/xen
5/updates/i386
5/updates/i386/RPMS
5/updates/i386/repodata
5/os/x86_64/CentOS
5/os/x86_64/repodata
5/os/x86_64/images
5/os/x86_64/images/pxeboot
5/os/x86_64/images/xen
5/updates/x86_64
5/updates/x86_64/RPMS
5/updates/x86_64/repodata

About your main issue; did you try older releases or different distros to test?
Maybe try these kernel options (noapic, acpi=off, etc...)

JD