I can't install MEPIS on HP Pavillion a1129n

if the computer doesn't boot from a CD, I'd return it.
I expect that a new computer will boot from CD.

Only dead fish go with the flow!

It isn't the CDs because the problem reoccurs with various CDs and various distors.

I tried various MEPIS boot options. The first error says:

cannot allocate resource region 3 of device 0000:00:00.0
IRQ 11: nobody cared!
handlers: [] (ata_interrupt+0x0/0x140)
disabling irq#11

then it hangs

I tried minimal and small boot options and got farther, but it stalls after:
loading usb support

Other distros offer such options as nousb and noapic, etc. With these options I can sometimes get to X but then it stalls and ctrl-alt-backspace does not work.

I was able to get into Puppy and Damn Small CDs using some boot options but I cannot rewrite GRUB from these disks.

I am not sure if the AMD 64 chip is causing my problems or it is my hardware. BTW, my video is ATI Radeon 128.Everything is quite standard equipment except the AMD chip. I am not sure who makes the motherboard, but it is probably HP proprietary. My HDs are Samsung 200 MB and Maxtor 160 MB.My mouse is Logitech cordless USB. It is the only USB device connected during boot up.

BTW, I am writing this from DSL live CD which booted to Fluxbox with only the nousb boot option.

Roy

Roy, I think what drlizau meant was, if the CD drive does not work, not the CD disk. But if you are able to boot DSL, then the drive does work.

Can you provide more information on the hard drives? Are the ATA, SATA, SCSI (probably not)? Did you already partition them in some way? Can you use DSL to start QTParted and post the information that it gives you on the drive types, partiton locations and sizes, file system types? You know, all that "interesting stuff"

Also, as another experiment, can you simply put a single drive in your system and see what happens when you boot? If you can spare the drive for this experiment, and you can sucessfully boot the Live CD, can you then install Mepis to the single drive?

The two items above will help isolate whether the problem's a hard drive issue, BIOS issue, drive controller issue...

Jon

The IRQ message suggests that the real problem is an IRQ conflict. Possibly DSL does not see all of your hardware and does not have this problem. If this is the case, you may be able to boot with a boot parameter. You add this parameter at the bottom of the GRUB screen on the line that usually ends in vga=791. If it works, you can edit /boot/grub/menu.lst as root and make it permanent. Many parameters are available -- finding the right one(s) is often guesswork. Start by trying acpi=off or acpi=noirq or pci=biosirq. There is a partial list of the parameters here (document is old and has not been updated). http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/BootPrompt-HOWTO.html

Post to http://www.mepislovers.org --- very helpful forum

See Mepislovers wiki --- http://www.mepislovers-wiki.org/

P.S. -- the parameters which you used with DSL can also be used with Mepis, though they may not work the same.

Mike

I've got that same compute as the original poster. I have had little trouble with Mepis in live-cd mode. You will find that the ATI video graphics will not run x. You could try to get the Linux drivers from ATI, but I have found difficulty in getting them installed. I have added a nVidia card and it works well on the a1129n. You might have to do that.

The 64-bit plays well with Mepis. However, you will be running on a time machine. The time will advance almost 1.5x the normal rate. There is little that can be done about this.

As to your boot problem, you need to make sure that your burned copy of Mepis is correct. You may have to try burning onto a CD-R and not a CD-RW. I have had that problem and it was fixed with I used a CD-R disc.

I have a a1129n (got it start of year refurbished)and in the last few days tried to get linux going on it.
Damn small worked from cd and everything else hanged just after the usb check.
on a kubuntu cd, i got it further with (If i remember correctly, linux irqpoll as the parameter. It said that one of the 1rq was probably wrong and suggested that option in the message before or after it hung. But ubuntu would not partition the disk. some sort of sata disk and i got stuck at partitioning.
After that, suddenly, knoppix worked too. I think I put in 3.7 and 4.02. I tried the hd install from knoppix 4.04 but they got a new partitioning tool, i was not familiar and i chickened out.
I used always to use an old mandrake 8 to partition stuff but it would not load on this computer. Too old, I guess! Hardware is all too new for it. Can any of you recommend some tool to partition the drive?
I am not a hacker. it is a 200 gig drive and i could keep 100 for windows and 100 for various types of linux. about 4 or 5 20 to 25 gig partitions. Last computer was 40 gig and I never used half of it.
I intend to edit home video on it eventually.
Brian

Only dead fish go with the flow!

I have been playing around trying to install MEPIS using some of the comments above. I have removed some hardware that could cause problems, but don't think that it is the long term answer. Thanks for your input.

I can now boot to the MEPIS installatiion disk using the 'minimum' choice from grub boot menu. The options listed for 'minimum' are as follows: apm=power_off vga=normal nomce acpi=off idc=nodma xdrvr=vesa.

When I try the same options when booting my existing MEPIS partition on the HD I can get to a prompt and login, but cannot load x which is a handicap for me since I know few bash commands.

I am not sure why these same options allow me to boot the CD, but not the HD. From boot CD, I can now get into KDE.

I am making progress, but do not know what to do next. I cannot install another video card because the computer has no open agp slot. Since the CD can boot to the graphical desktop with my existing card, then I must be able to do it when booting from the HD as well.

BTW, my Windows drive does not show from MEPIS, but I can live with that for now. It says hdc has no irq.

I could install a fresh copy of MEPIS if that would help onto my MEPIS partition. I would have to re-install all of my applications, but that is no big deal.

Any suggestions?

Roy

Only dead fish go with the flow!

I have installed MEPIS onto my HD. Yeah! I can now boot into both Windows and MEPIS. My version of MEPIS is an older version. The most recent one does not work, possibly because it is on a CD-RW disk.

However, I cannot access my Windows drive from MEPIS. The drive is a 200 GB SATA drive. I suspect that this is the source of my problems. I will try to disconnect this drive and see if I can get MEPIS to work with usb support, etc.

I see that others have had the same problem. Maybe this will help you to install MEPIS onto your Pavilion a1129n.

I am curious about support for SATA drives. Are they problematic for Linux?

Roy

Hi Roy,

What version of Mepis are you using? I have not done enough testing with the newest 3.4-3 version, and I don't have any SATA drives, but I recall from other posts that the 3.4-3 version should work with SATA drives. However, the earlier 3.3.1 does not.

Perhaps you can give us some more specifics

Jon

I have installed Mepis (both 3.3 and 3.4) on a laptop (Dell Inspiron 6000) with a SATA drive, it worked fine, though if I recall under 3.3 the drive showed up as /dev/hda, whereas under 3.4 it was /dev/sda. Worked fine under both.

-- B.

Only dead fish go with the flow!

I have downloaded the latest MEPIS and have burned the ISO to disk.

Here's the good news:

MEPIS boots fine as long as I choose VESA boot option. It shows all of my drives and has usb support. That is great!

Here's the problem:

When I try to install Mepis to my HD it allows me to use QTParted and installs fine. Then it asks to install the Grub loader and then says that it can't probably due to a change in disk format. Fine. I skip that for now. It allows me to set up a new user, but fails when I try to set the root password. It says cannot set root password.

I have tried countless times on many different installations with the same problems. I have tried short passwords and long ones. I have typed slowly and carefully and it does not accept any root pasword.

Question:

Is this a problem with my Mepis CD? Should I download and burn another one?

BTW, I am still having troubles getting other distro CDs to boot on my hardware. Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, and others will not even boot. Only StartCom, DSL, Puppy and Mepis boot.

StartCom, a Red Hat derivative, installs fine, but it won't allow me to install any new programs because it says my root password is wrong without even asking me to type it. Most of the apps it comes with are outdated. Just in case you wondered what it was.

Mepis is still the best distro all things considered!

Thanks.

My old HD is installed in the computer but my old installation of MEPIS will not boot. This is probably because the it booted from another drive which is not present in the new computer.

Did you try removing this drive? Sounds to me like your jumpers are wrong and/or your BIOS is confused.

Thanks for the input. That old setup is now gone. I have totally restructured the HD and that version of MEPIS is history.

I think that my jumpers are okay because I have no problem with the setup in Windows XP or on Linux versions that I have been able to run.

The problem with my system seems to be something to do with the video because almost no distro will run unless I add the lines vga=normal and xdrvr=vesa. Once I do that almost every distro will boot up to a live or installation CD. My video is onboard and runs using ATI Radeon drivers. This sounds harmless enough, but there is something that is causing Linux to crash, hang or whatever.

The good thing is that the newest MEPIS is even better. Now if I can just figure out why it won't allow me to set the root password I would be okay.

Thanks again.

Only dead fish go with the flow!

I just built a brand new Athlon64 skt939 system that would not complete the loading of Mepis from the live CD, so I removed the SATA hard disk and plugged it into another machine and loaded Mepis using that machine. Put the drive back into the original and Mepis works beautifully.

In your case, if you can put your drives into another system, make sure your drives are on the same IDE channels and the same jumper position as they were on your own system, but DO NOT try to start Windows, or you will break the poor little weakling, so make sure the bios is set to boot from cd first and get the Mepis CD in the drive before you start the other PC.

Another thought I had was jumpering drives with new motherboards not only requires the jumpers to be in the correct positions on the drives, but the drives to be in the correct position on the cables too. If certain brands of hard disks are set as Master, then they absolutly have to be on the end connector of the ribbon cable, and the drive jumpered as slave in the middle.

I have seen a small number of windows machines fail to boot when one of these drives is moved from the end of the cable to the middle connector, without changing the jumper, and when the jumper was changed, it got only as far as a hal.dll error (32-bit hell for MS users)

Mike P

Thanks to all for their help. I was able to install MEPIS and am now using it as my primary OS. I had some hardware issues that I got a friend to sort out and now is all well.

My only difficulty so far is the system clock which runs way too fast. I will do some searching for cures for this issue if there are any. My keyboard needed to be slowed down as well, but that was an easy fix.

Thanks again.

Only dead fish go with the flow!

The link below describes some fixes for AMD processors that run 2x fast:

64 Bit way too fast | MEPIS
http://www.mepis.org/node/9789

Jon