bill.hardy
August 12th, 2008, 06:19 PM
I'm a long time user of Linux but a first time installer and the experience is leaving me pining for my days of sysadmins. My system is a Dell Inspiron 530 with a Q6600 processor (that's a Core 2 Quad), SATA harddrive, and a basic integrated Intel 3100 integrated GMA. It seemed like this set-up should be just fine for Ubuntu so I had Vista (which I need to keep) free up a chunk of my harddrive, popped in the Ubuntu 8.04 Server (AMD64 version) install CD and installed away (manually choosing the freed space and auto-partitioning it into scratch and EXT3).
The installation seemed to go just fine but when I restarted and selected Ubuntu at the GRUB menu, things started to go very wrong. The first error messages I saw were things like
ata1.00: qc timeout (cmd 0x27)
ata1.00: failed to read native max address (err_mask=0x4)
ata1.00: revalidation failed (errno = -5)
It kept going though and this was followed a while later by something like:
Machine Check Exception: 5 bank 5: <....>
RIP !INEXACT! 10:<....> {apic_timer_interrupt+0x0/0x70}
TSC 4db4dd4658
Kernel panic - not syncing: Machine check
At which point things ground to a halt. Restarting and booting into Vista, I discovered that my machine would no longer sleep properly. In fact, once told to sleep, it would take *two* hard restarts to get it operational again. Luckily, after deleting the Ubuntu partition and rewriting the Vista MBR, that seems to have been fixed.
I still need to get some flavour of Linux installed on this thing though and I'm hoping I can get Ubuntu to cooperate. I've googled around and people seem to be saying the "machine check exception" messages mean that my hardware is defective. But Vista seems to be running perfectly fine so that's hard for me to believe. I'm pondering installing a second harddrive I have laying around and installing Ubuntu on that and using the BIOS bootloader instead of GRUB, which it seems to me should eliminate any kind of Vista vs. Ubuntu problems that might be going on. I'm hoping to figure out what my problems are though before I leap into that whole procedure. Does anyone have any idea what is going on with my machine? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The installation seemed to go just fine but when I restarted and selected Ubuntu at the GRUB menu, things started to go very wrong. The first error messages I saw were things like
ata1.00: qc timeout (cmd 0x27)
ata1.00: failed to read native max address (err_mask=0x4)
ata1.00: revalidation failed (errno = -5)
It kept going though and this was followed a while later by something like:
Machine Check Exception: 5 bank 5: <....>
RIP !INEXACT! 10:<....> {apic_timer_interrupt+0x0/0x70}
TSC 4db4dd4658
Kernel panic - not syncing: Machine check
At which point things ground to a halt. Restarting and booting into Vista, I discovered that my machine would no longer sleep properly. In fact, once told to sleep, it would take *two* hard restarts to get it operational again. Luckily, after deleting the Ubuntu partition and rewriting the Vista MBR, that seems to have been fixed.
I still need to get some flavour of Linux installed on this thing though and I'm hoping I can get Ubuntu to cooperate. I've googled around and people seem to be saying the "machine check exception" messages mean that my hardware is defective. But Vista seems to be running perfectly fine so that's hard for me to believe. I'm pondering installing a second harddrive I have laying around and installing Ubuntu on that and using the BIOS bootloader instead of GRUB, which it seems to me should eliminate any kind of Vista vs. Ubuntu problems that might be going on. I'm hoping to figure out what my problems are though before I leap into that whole procedure. Does anyone have any idea what is going on with my machine? Any help would be greatly appreciated.