Can't boot on Dell Precision M70

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Can't boot on Dell Precision M70
started by: marlas

Posted by marlas on Oct. 08 2006,16:56

hi all,

i'm trying to boot the live-cd on my M70 but whatever i enter at the boot prompt it results in a black screen and system hangs.

when i boot with failsafe i get the error message

Code: Bad EIP value
<0> Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

i tried knoppix, that works

any ideas?

thanx
marla

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Oct. 08 2006,22:46

Here's some ideas: < http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....t=13567 >

If not, you could always try failsafe :P

Posted by marlas on Oct. 09 2006,09:00

thanks, i found it.

it works with "acpi=off" but not with "noacpi".

what is the difference between these two commands, i thought it was same?

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Oct. 09 2006,21:15

Hm, I'm not sure myself, but looking around there are combinations of both.

Posted by linuxball on Oct. 11 2006,14:20

Hi all:

I have the same Problem with my Dell Precision M65 (as far as I remember correctly it is very similar to the M70 from the hardware point of view, only the display size is different).

Option "acpi=off" helps and then it starts with only one of the 2 CPU cores. Knoppix 5.0.1 has no problems to boot without "acpi=off" and detects both CPU cores.

I would like to add some additional information:

Notebook: Dell Precision M65
CPU0 and CPU1: Intel® Core™2 CPU T7200@2.00GHz stepping 06, 4 MB cache
RAM: 2GiB
HD: 120GB SATA Hitachi HTS54161

If I start with "vga=normal" only I can see the following output:

Code Sample

boot: dsl vga=normal
Loading linux24...................
Loading minirt24.gz...............
Ready.
Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.
Oops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010:[<00000000>] Not tainted
EFLAGS: 00010282
eax: 00000006 ebx: f7f0d000 ecx: 00000000 edx: 00000000
esi: f7f0d000 edi: f7f1bae0 ebp: 00000002 esp: c2819e68
ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018
Process swapper (pid: 1, stackpage=c2819000)
Stack: f7f0e200 f7f1c9a0 f7f0d000 00000000 c01823c1 f7f0d000 f7f0d000 f7f0d1e8
00000000 f8807feb c018ffe4 f7f0d000 f7f0d000 f7f26000 f7ffc690 00000000
00000000 f7f1bb60 f7f1bae0 c019037a f7f0d000 00000000 f7f26c00 f7ffc310
Call Trace: [<c01823c1>] [<c018ffe4>] [<c019037a>] [<c0190cbe>] [<c018d2b9>]
[<c018d23e>] [c018d0eb>] [<c018d501>] [<c018e5fc>] [<c018d3a2>] [<c018d488>]
[<c019754f>] [<c01050ad>] [<c0107114>]

Code: Bad EIP value.
<0>Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

Because the Knoppix v5.0.1 kernel (and the kernel of many other Live Linux Systems, e.g. grml 0.8, Ubuntu v6.10beta, Mandriva Linux 2007, arklinux live 2006.1) is booting fine my best guess is that some kernel support required for the notebook (e.g. SMP support) is not compiled in.

Can somebody confirm or disprove this?

Best regards,

THE linuxball

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Oct. 11 2006,20:32

How does "acpi=off" 'help'? What does using failsafe output? DId you try other power options?

SMP support is built into the kernel. Maybe it's the dual-core thing that's not detected, or something else that disables it.

Afaik, other laptop users have gotten that "Bad EIP value" error due to different screen dimensions - maybe try different ones for vga=### (press F2/F3 or see wiki for more info).