Linux installation crashes; hardware problem?

[GigaCluster]

I had my computer for several years now, seemingly without hardware problems. I ran Windows on it, it rarely crashed, etc. Then I decided to install Linux on it. I downloaded and burned Linux Mandrake 8.2 at school, brought it home, tried to install it... at the very first screen where it loads the installer to the machine, it always gave a signal 11 error and stopped responding. Interestingly enough, sometimes it gave that error in the first half of the progress bar, and other times, in the second half. You never knew exactly when it would give an error. I went back to school and burned another copy, thinking that my disc is bad. The second copy had the same problem. I got the MD5 checksum of the file at school and it indeed matched the original ISO's checksum. Finally, after about 10 attempts, Mandrake installed onto my system. Even then, it was not perfect -- when I was compiling something with GCC, GCC would occasionally segfault and told me that I should report it to qa.mandrakesoft.com.

Then I messed up Mandrake (tried recompiling the kernel, suddenly my X started flickering), so I backed everything up, reformatted my hard drive, and decided to install RedHat 7.3 on it, because they offered KDE 3.0. So I downloaded all tree discs of RedHat, burned them, and started the installation. This time, RedHat allowed me to configure everything (no crashes yet), allowed me to select the packages that I want, etc. Then about 10 minutes into the actual installation (copying files), it froze without any visible errors. I rebooted, tried again. Same problem... again, you never knew when it would freeze... it seemed to freeze at a random point during copying files. I decided to use the "text" mode of installation, thinking that maybe X wasn't stable on my hardware... again RedHat froze, but this time it gave me this screenful.

After several attempts like this, believe it or not, the installation finished. I had RedHat fully installed, complete with X11. Everything worked. I downloaded Gaim, compiled it and ran it successfully, installed Mozilla, etc.
Then, as luck would have it, I tried to fix my mouse wheel by running XF86config... I originally planned to make a backup copy of the existing (working) X configuration file, but I backed up the wrong one! (Backed up XF86config instead of XF86config-4)... not knowing my refresh/sync rates, my X was screwed.

So I decided to reinstall RedHat, thinking that if it worked once, it will work again... no such luck. Today I tried to reinstall it about 10-15 times, each time it gave me an error at a different point during the installation. Sometimes it would "gracefully" exit, shutting down all services and ejecting the installation CD... sometimes it would abort with the aforementioned screenful but obviously varying numbers.

Anyway... to sum it up: two out of two distributions of Linux refuse to install on my machine 95% of the time. Can anyone make an educated guess as to why I am having all these problems? Any ideas would be appreciated.

 

[denali]

Take a look at this it describes the signal 11 error. You might want to describe your hardware setup.

If you otherboard has the KT266A chipset you might try the follwing.

Press "ESC" when you see the LILO bootloader screen, and type "linux nobiospnp".
The system will boot correctly, giving you the change to edit /etc/lilo.conf. Add the
"nobiospnp" option to every "append=" line in lilo.conf, then run /sbin/lilo, and reboot.

 

[GigaCluster]

Hi;

Thanks for the reply; however, I don't think you understand my problem. My problem is not that I get a signal 11 during kernel compilation... I get a signal 11 during INSTALLATION of Linux. Therefore, there's nothing I can do in LILO, because I never get that far.

 

[Nothinman]

Sounds like a memory problem, try running memtest86. If you're overclocking, don't.

 

[GigaCluster]

How can I run that?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: GigaCluster
How can I run that?

Probably with a DOS startup disk.

 

[Nothinman]

Ever hear of google.com? It's got answers to many questions.

Once you find the memtest86 site all your questions about it will be answered.

 

[GigaCluster]

Thanks for suggesting that program -- I never knew of its existence.
I ran it for several passes, and it found NO problems with my memory.
Now I am entirely confused... what else could it be?

One more thing I didn't mention in my first post: I ran Windows XP on it for many months, and never had any problems with it.

 

[Nothinman]

You never gave any details as to the hardware in the PC. Also I don't think you mentioned whether you were overclocking or not, Windows is much more lenient when it comes to things like that.

 

[GigaCluster]

Whee, on the third pass, there was an error: the read value was 0 instead of a 4.

I am using an AMD K6-2 450 MHz processor on a VIA motherboard without any overclocking... I don't know the model of my motherboard.
256 MB of SDRAM, 168-pin DIMMs.
Two hard drives, one is a WD 45 GB (my BIOS only sees 33 GB of it), and one is a Seagate 9.9 GB. An old Trident 2 MB video card that I've been meaning to replace for a long time. That's basically all I can tell you about my system.

Could that single error on the 3rd pass have such a fatal effect on the Linux installation every time, whereas Windows runs perfectly?