Laptops :: segmentation violation at boot on old NEC :(

Alright, first time linux installer here. Total linux newbie.

Picked up a NEC 486dx with 12mb ram and 250 disk for free, win3.1 ran great but in trying to get winsock going I broke it enough that it stopped booting. I wasn't really interested in DOS or fixing the windows install, so after a bit of googling for small linux distros I tried DSL.

This machine doesn't have a cd, so I pulled the drive and installed DSL frugal (lilo) from the livecd using my main PC. My setup is:

hda1 -> 55mb, primary, boot. holds the image.
hda5 -> 100mb, logical. holds home and opt.
hda5 -> 100mb. logical, swap (type 83). made into a swap partition with mkswap and swapon.

I set boot options -> home=hda5 opt=hda5

After everything was installed onto the little drive, I put it back into the laptop. Apart from being absurdly slow, the boot process chugs along, setting up ram disk and scanning for drives and whatnot until it hits INIT.

I get

INIT: PANIC: segmentation violation at 0x804cfc6! sleeping for 30 seconds.

forever...

Any hints?

Thanks!

INIT: PANIC: segmentation violation at 0x804cfc6! sleeping for 30 seconds.

Bad drive or bad ram man

http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/q16.8.html

Brian
AwPhuch

Ahhhh, that sucks. Not entirely suprising given the age of the machine.

It has some sort of stupid looking memory card instead of normal looking ram, so I doubt I'll be finding a replacement.

Thanks though!

0x804cfc6 (hexadecimal number) = 134533062 (decimal)

Your 12 MB is 12582912 (decimal) so it seems that it tries to access non-existing memory. I'm not sure how you boot this box but it is possible to tell the kernel how much memory you have - you can add "mem=12M" (without quotes) somewhere in your boot process (loadlin/lilo/...). Can you give us a bit more info about how you boot this box?

And if you want to test the memory: http://www.memtest.org/

original here.