9.04 CD won't boot on PowerEdge 600SC

[RandomJoe]

I have a Dell PowerEdge 600SC (2.4GHz P4, 768MB RAM) that has been happily running 6.06 for quite some time now. Got bored and thought I would install 9.04 today, but no joy. I first tried the standard desktop install CD, the graphical boot screen appears and the progress bar gets about two passes in then freezes. The alternate install CD simply displays the line:


MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC

then freezes. I have tried 'noapic', the above line doesn't appear, but the system still freezes and NOTHING is displayed. I have also tried the other options available in the boot menu, but nothing worked.

I even tried using ALL the extra options: 'acpi=off', 'noapic', 'nolapic', 'edd=on' - and got a slightly different first message, but it still locked up. This time, I got:


Bios bug: Local APIC #0 not detected...
...forcing use of dummy APIC emulation (tell your hw vendor)

Just to be sure, I grabbed a couple other recent distros and they boot just fine, as does the original 6.06 of course. Nothing had the exact same kernel of course, Slackware uses 2.6.27 which booted fine.

The system has an add-in SATA card with four drives in a RAID, but I removed that so only a single 160GB HDD is attached to the motherboard's IDE controller. All other cards have been removed as well.

Any thoughts? It would appear to be a kernel issue of some sort, not happy with some hardware or something, but I don't know what - if anything - I could try to continue booting...

[merlinus]

I assume you did a checksum on your .iso, burned at no more than 4x speed, and checked the cd for errors at the opening menu....

[RandomJoe]

Yes. The CDs are good.

[merlinus]

Did you try running the live cd in both try without changing anything and safe graphics modes?

[RandomJoe]

Yes. Same thing, graphical boot screen appears and the progress bar makes a couple passes then freezes. After that, nothing works. Have to hit the power or reset button on the computer.

[merlinus]

Seems like some sort of hardware issue, but what??? You might try the text-based alternate install cd...

[RandomJoe]

Well, as I mentioned in the original post, I did that. Simply lists the line about 'MP-BIOS bug' and then freezes.

The MP-BIOS bug warning is, in my experience, not a fatal one - I have other machines that always report it on first boot, but go on to operate just fine. Also, using 'noapic' gets rid of that warning but the system still freezes.

Ah well... Maybe I'll just go Slack on that one again! :lolflag: