Mystery: Why did an old system stop working?

External Since: May 23, 2006 Posts: 24

On Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:33:28 +0000, Andrew Gideon wrote:

> On Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:56:44 +0000, Andrew Gideon wrote:
>
>> I'm going to next try Fedora 4 to confirm that it fails as I remember
>> it.
>
> Fedora 4 works. So there's some "breaking point" between this and
> CentOS 5. Now to find it...

Well, that was easy: Fedora 5 doesn't work.

In one of the separate consoles, the last thing Fedora 5 displays during
the install is that device mapper is initialized. Fedora 4 displays
this, and then displays:

<6>parport: PnPBIOS parport detected.
<6>parport0: PC-style at 0x378 (0x778), irq 7 [PCSPP,TRISTATE,EPP]

So: Any thoughts or ideas at what might be "wrong" with this old system
such that Fedora 4 installs but Fedora 5 (plus at least some later
versions of Fedora and CentOS 5) don't?

Reminder: All works well when there's only a single drive. But when
there are two drives, the above failure scenario occurs. It doesn't seem
to matter if the two drives are master and slave or two masters on the
two IDE channels on the motherboard.

- Andrew

External Since: May 23, 2006 Posts: 24

On Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:54:07 +0000, Andrew Gideon wrote:

> So: Any thoughts or ideas at what might be "wrong" with this old system
> such that Fedora 4 installs but Fedora 5 (plus at least some later
> versions of Fedora and CentOS 5) don't?
>
> Reminder: All works well when there's only a single drive. But when
> there are two drives, the above failure scenario occurs. It doesn't
> seem to matter if the two drives are master and slave or two masters on
> the two IDE channels on the motherboard.

I've tried appending to the Fedora 5 kernel line:

lp=0 pnpbios=off pnpacpi=off noapic noacpi

but there was no change.

Thanks...

- Andrew