jamespetts
August 6th, 2011, 08:06 PM
I am having repeated installation failures with 11.04. My father's computer, a Pentium 4 machine originally from 2003, but much upgraded since, (and all the time having been overclocked successfully from 2.4Ghz to 3.0Ghz) had already been running 11.04 without difficulty until the main hard drive, a WD VelociRaptor 150Gb unit, failed. The drive was only intermittently recognised in the BIOS and would often become inaccessible during use, causing severe instability. When booting the computer with the drive attached, it would often get stuck at the BIOS screen, "updating NVRAM". When Linux was first installed on that computer earlier this year (it had previously been my computer and run Windows XP), I had given it 10.10, and then upgraded later to 11.04, so it had not previously had 11.04 installed from scratch.
When the hard drive failed, I suggested that my father buy a new 60Gb Corsair SSD, and I planned to install Linux onto that drive from scratch (he had previously been using the computer in live CD mode as an emergency stop-gap; it had worked fine in this mode, and had run Memtest86 without errors when my father tested it when the HDD first failed, as I had advised him to do to eliminate the memory/motherboard as a cause of the problem).
When I came to install the drive, I noticed that the system was no longer overclocked, and eventually found that the BIOS battery had gone flat. I replaced that, and the system time and other BIOS settings were no longer reset after restarting the computer; however, I could no longer get a stable overclock even with what I remembered of the old settings (but my memory might well not have been accurate). I resolved to run it at stock speeds to install the OS and see whether I could overclock it afterwards. I did, however, install a new northbridge fan, as the system, although it had originally had a northbridge fan, now lacked one, and I thought that that might help with the overclocking.
However, having run the install process seven or eight times at least with three different CDs (one the original CD that I used to install 11.04 originally, and the other two burned this afternoon from a fresh download of the ISO), the installation fails every time. Mostly, the installation simply stalls permanently at the "removing old language packs" message. Sometimes, however, it will give a "file on disk does not match the file on the CD" error, but will go away when I click "retry"; usually in those cases, I am booted after a while into a text-filled screen with an error message: "BUG: Unable to handle kernel paging request at [memory address]" followed by a large chunk of incomprehensible text. The install process appears to continue in the background despite this, with heavy CD and HDD activity but also then eventually stalls.
For the avoidance of doubt, these failures occur with the system running at stock speeds (the AGP/PCI bus never having been overclocked in the first instance in any event), and having run from the live CD for many weeks without any sign of instability, installing onto a brand new SSD from one tried and trusted Unbutu CD and two newly burned Ubuntu CD alternately, with often exactly the same error persistent for repeated attempts. I have also tried both installing directly from booting, or from the desktop from the live CD, both with identical results.
If it is of relevance, there is also another hard drive in the system, a 400Gb WD (non-Raptor) drive that had previously been mounted as /home, which I leave alone in GPartd.
I should be very grateful indeed for any idea(s) as to what might be the trouble and how to deal with this issue.
When the hard drive failed, I suggested that my father buy a new 60Gb Corsair SSD, and I planned to install Linux onto that drive from scratch (he had previously been using the computer in live CD mode as an emergency stop-gap; it had worked fine in this mode, and had run Memtest86 without errors when my father tested it when the HDD first failed, as I had advised him to do to eliminate the memory/motherboard as a cause of the problem).
When I came to install the drive, I noticed that the system was no longer overclocked, and eventually found that the BIOS battery had gone flat. I replaced that, and the system time and other BIOS settings were no longer reset after restarting the computer; however, I could no longer get a stable overclock even with what I remembered of the old settings (but my memory might well not have been accurate). I resolved to run it at stock speeds to install the OS and see whether I could overclock it afterwards. I did, however, install a new northbridge fan, as the system, although it had originally had a northbridge fan, now lacked one, and I thought that that might help with the overclocking.
However, having run the install process seven or eight times at least with three different CDs (one the original CD that I used to install 11.04 originally, and the other two burned this afternoon from a fresh download of the ISO), the installation fails every time. Mostly, the installation simply stalls permanently at the "removing old language packs" message. Sometimes, however, it will give a "file on disk does not match the file on the CD" error, but will go away when I click "retry"; usually in those cases, I am booted after a while into a text-filled screen with an error message: "BUG: Unable to handle kernel paging request at [memory address]" followed by a large chunk of incomprehensible text. The install process appears to continue in the background despite this, with heavy CD and HDD activity but also then eventually stalls.
For the avoidance of doubt, these failures occur with the system running at stock speeds (the AGP/PCI bus never having been overclocked in the first instance in any event), and having run from the live CD for many weeks without any sign of instability, installing onto a brand new SSD from one tried and trusted Unbutu CD and two newly burned Ubuntu CD alternately, with often exactly the same error persistent for repeated attempts. I have also tried both installing directly from booting, or from the desktop from the live CD, both with identical results.
If it is of relevance, there is also another hard drive in the system, a 400Gb WD (non-Raptor) drive that had previously been mounted as /home, which I leave alone in GPartd.
I should be very grateful indeed for any idea(s) as to what might be the trouble and how to deal with this issue.