Hi there, today I got a new Acer Aspire 3100 laptop. It came with XP on it, so I formatted and installed FC5.

Instalation went fine, no issues or errors reported at all.

When I start the laptop, and it starts to boot it gives the following errors:

Uncomprssing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.
PCI: BIOS BUG #81[00000000] found
PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 7 of bridge 0000:00:04.0
PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 8 of bridge 0000:00:04.0
PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 9 of bridge 0000:00:04.0
PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 7 of bridge 0000:00:05.0
PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 8 of bridge 0000:00:05.0
Red Hat nash version 5.0.32 starting
INIT: version 2.86 booting
Welcome to Fedora Core
Press 'I' to enter interactive starup
Setting clock (localtime): Fri Sep 29 09:18:27 CEST 2006 [ OK ]
Starting udev: Wait timeout. Will continue in the background [ FAILED ]

Thats all I see on the screen.

Does anyone know what the problem is and how to fix it? Any help very appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

E_Man

Is the DVD Drive included (build in) or has it to be attached?
Did you try with attached and w/o ?
Is there a Bios Update around from Acer?
Can you try with acpi=off ?

Hmmm... Since this forum won't let me post urls I'll quote myself from Fedoraforum:

"I am in no way a Linux Guru, rather a n00b then but I've always propagated for Linux and Fedora in particular, so when I ditched my uber-die-hard A64 X2 gaming machine and got myself an Aspire 5112WLMi with integrated everything kinda(btooth, wlan, yadayadayada) and 120GB Sata disk I decided that it was time for a change and partitioned the disk for 15GB Windblows, 16GB Linux and the rest as a "data storage" using FAT32(so it could be mounted easily in FC). XP works a charm on this machine if you opt against using the Acer supplied preinstalled ****e and do a fresh install off a real media and not the restore disks. When I installed FC5 however I got quite a headache, the install runs smoothly in GUI mode and everything seems fine until you reboot for the last part. the module udev won't start and the boot process is halted there(it can't continue), while searching for some fix for this problem I decided to try the "noapic nolapic acpi=off" at GRUB but that will end with a kernel panic so it wouldn't do... Someone thought that updating pcmicautils would fix it but it won't, running yum -y update all makes your machine download 1GB of updates but won't apply any of them(in my case anyway) because it couldn't resolve dependencies for something.

What fixed my problems were these steps and I'm sharing them here to maybe, just maybe relieve someone else from the same headache:

1. When your machine reboots quickly tell the BIOS bootsequence to boot the FC5 DVD/CD again and type "linux rescue" at the prompt, it will then ask if the network interfaces whould be enabled, choose yes and proceed to let it configure by DHCP or manually. Next it will ask if it should mount your filesystem as RW, RO or not at all, choose continue here to mount it RW, press ok at the end of the mount process and take note of the message "chroot /mnt/sysimage", it will be your friend in a short while.

2. Enter "chroot /mnt/sysimage" at the prompt and press enter(a tip for newbies that are unaware, type chroot /mnt/sys and press the TAB key to complete the directory name. Your HDD installation of FC is now mounted as root and everything you type will affect it's files, typing rm -rf * might not be the best of ideas now.

3. Type "yum -y install kernel-smp", this will cause yum to look through the online repositories and install(at the moment at least) kernel 2.6.17-1.2187_FC5smp, but you aren't ready to go yet, type "yum -y update udev" and when it's done installing, type "yum -y update pcmiciautils"(you might have to type "pcmcia-utils" instead since I always end up typing wrong the first time)

4. You should be set now, type exit, press enter and exit and press enter again to reboot, remove your FC5 disc and sit back while it boots.

Unless you have some ultra-different special external devices that I don't have you will now be presented with the final X-based part of the install(I run KDE by the way if you wonder, I'm not compatible with Gnome

I hope this will solve someone's nightmare out there... Now all I wish for is that ATi suddenly decides to make good stable working drivers for X that won't FUBAR your system, if you decide to try them please open terminal window, type su - and specify yoyr root password, type cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etx/X11/xorg.conf.failsafe and press enter, do this prior to the install to be sure that you have a backup copy that's not recognized by any installers and can't be FUBARed up by them because I am almost 100% sure that you will end up pressing enter and then "a" to add a "3" at the end of the kernel boot string in grub after having stared at a black screen where your login screen should have been... if this happens, log in as root under runlevel 3 and simply "cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.failsafe /etc/x11/xorg.conf" and then return to the drawing board... Good luck! (trying to solve problems like this and not giving up is a good way to become more aquainted to your distro of choice, but wives and girlfriends might think you're an asocial buff "

I posted that earlier today and it obviously applies to you as well but you wouldn't want an smp kernel, instead of "yum -y install kernel-smp" just type "yum -y install kernel" and that should do the trick, don't forget the other two as well...

Later on you will run into a problem with the integrated graphics I believe, I am working at solving that too and will post an update if I figure a FIX out, not just saying "Wow, I have the same problem but don't know how to fix it", have found all too many of those so far and they don't exactly help, right?

Best regards, a fellow Swede
ps. This write-up is actually directed to newbie users = all steps pretty explained...

ok i had the exact same problem as english man on my acer aspire 5110 and i followed all of your steps and now i dont get that problem anymore, but when i boot after saying the udev: [ok] it flickers the login screen and then just goes black and has a little x cursor on the screen. it sits on this page for at least 5 minutes before flickering back to the login screen. but i still cant login because it skips the user setup that is supposed to happen on the first run after installation.....any suggestions?

Well, I found out that the ATi integrated graphics wouldn't work at all in X.org 7.0, so I ditched Fedora for Kubuntu 6.10 instead, I believe that it will work in Fedora 6 tho, mind trying it out?

i would try fedora 6 but i only have a copy of the FC5 dvd installation.....

if you press "a" in the Grub menu at boot and add a "3" at the end of the kernel line it should boot to a prompt, where you can log in as root, do that and then navigate to /etc/X11 and type in "nano -w xorg.conf" or "vim xorg.conf", look through it for a section called device, probably it will say that it's using the driver "ati" or "radeon" and they don't work with either the X1150 or the X1600 and you have to change that to "vesa", save and then reboot. The only way to get the integrated Ati graphics working on the 3100-5100-5110 series is to install a distro with Xorg 7.1, like Ubuntu 6.1, FC6 or Debian SID... Haven't tried OpenSuSE so I can't speak from experience there, but Debian SID isn't exactly stable enough to use, FC6 I've only tried the beta and it didn't create an initrd for me so I had to do that myself and then something crashed later on so I steered away from that and am now running Kubuntu 6.10 Edgy since two weeks back and I'm pretty satisfied with it, some minor quirks with USB detection from time to time but otherwise it's smoothly humming along.

Hi.

I am having the exact same problem where udev completely hangs at bootup (FC5). I took the advice here and updated the kernel, udev and pcmciatutils in the rescue mode. Unfortunately, it did not help. The difference may be that my computer is a desktop workstation (Dell Precision 450). I have no idea what's causing the timeout here. Any help would be appreciated.

TIA,
Dai

Could you specify what hardware it's based on? GFX, CPU, etc...

The acer 3100 has a problem with memory address 0. It will randomly reset address 0 to all zeroes. Any bootable CD memory test will show this including the Microsoft windows memory diagnotic, downloaded from microsoft. Knowing this you may have a work around.

Hi Foxen.

The Dell has dual Xeon (2.4GHz HT-enabled) processors, an nVidia Quadro 4 NVS graphics card, and a 120GB SATA hard disk. I'm not sure what chipsets it has. I could look it up by using "lshw" tomorrow. In the meantime, any insight would be appreciated.

If the 3100 has that problem as you say, then both the 5100 and 5110 series will have it aswell... Same motherboard and BIOS..

That's quite a different machine compared to my laptop, the only common thing is the dual processor part... other than that I have no idea.

I have yet to test these work arounds, but will do as soon a I get a reliable internet access. Still running M$! Ahhhh.

E_Man

No problem. Thanks for taking the time anyway.

I eneded up intalling CentOS on the Dell machine instead. It has turned out to be a perfect idea - CentOS seems to be so much more stable than FC5 as far as I can see.