Newly built PC - Kernel Panic

[senthil]

Hi,

I am a newbie to PC building. I built a PC with the following components:

- Cooler Master Case
- Thermaltake Power Supply
- ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2 Mobo
- Pentium EE Dual-Core
- 1 GB (2x512MB)
- ATI HD2400 Video card

I popped in an old 40G IDE Hard drive. Then, installed Fedora8 on it. Ran into two
issues:

- The kernel starts up fine, but panics right away in the middle of boot up process
- When I reboot from the OS, the system does not reboot. I had to use hw reset switch

What tools I can use to check the integriy of the various components of the system. In
other words where do I begin to troubleshoot.

Thanks,
--
..Senthil

 

[Rubycon]

Sounds like memory errors.

http://www.memtest86.com

Download the iso file and burn a CD with your favorite burning program.

Text

 

[senthil]

Forgot to mention, if I boot with a livecd, it works fine.

 

[OdiN]

Can't you just speak soothingly to it to calm it down?

Anyway...yeah could be RAM - maybe a motherboard issue if it's not cold booting.

 

[AmberClad]

Personally, whenever I get kernel panics, it's almost always a result of a required driver not being compiled into or included as a module in the kernel. Last time this happened, I was rolling my own bare, fast-booting kernel, and decided to remove all SCSI support. I didn't realize that the IDE/SATA drives required it because there was apparently a dependency by the "libsata" library on some of the SCSI modules (don't ask me why ).

I've never had a kernel panic that was a result of faulty hardware (yet). Anyways, I think this question would probably be better suited to LQ.

 

[Roguestar]

I think rubycon was right.

I was getting Kernel Panic errors in Kubuntu about six months ago, because of my RAM. It started off fine on live CD because it didn't hit the parts of the RAM that were crapping themselves (couldn't use XP at the time as it hit the dodgy frames far too early) but eventually running things on my standard install would stall the PC, fail to boot for a while etc. Memtest showed over 1000 errors per pass at two particular points (418MB and 1074MB) so I had to get my memory RMA'd.

Burn memtest, run it for a few hours and see.