Hello,
I have an IBM Thinkpad laptop which has no CD-ROM Drive. I booted it into DOS, loaded the network card drivers, and copied over the Slackware packages to the DOS partition. I booted the kernel using loadlin with the following:

loadlin bzimage root=/dev/ram rw initrd=initrd.img

with bzimage being the image from bare.i. I choose to install from a hard drive partition, and select the DOS copied package location. I select the packages and hit install everything.

The kernel loads fine, and setup goes fine until a certain point, in which the kernel panicks.


Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 000000280
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010:[<c010c168>] Not tainted
EFLAGS: 00010012
eax: 0000008a ebz: 00000010 ecx: ffffffff edx: 0000023e
esi: c0340000 edi: c0340000 ebp: ffffe0000 esp: c0341fd0
ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018
Process swapper (pid: 0, stackpag=c0341000)
Stack: c0107040 c0107063 00000010 00000246 c0107102 00000000 000994d2 c0105000
0008e000
c03426b2 c035f6e0 c0100191
Call Trace: [<c0107040>] [<c0107063>] [<c0107102>] [<c0105000>]

Code: 8b 83 70 02 00 00 23 4c 10 c4 eb cc 8d b6 00 00 00 00 8d bf
<0>Kernel panic: Attempted to kill the idle task!
In idle task - not syncing.
hda: lost interrupt

This also happens (although, not sure if it is the exact error, but it is a NULL Pointer dereference) sometimes when I do a quick or do not format the partition during the format procedure. It does not happen, however, when I do a slow format checking for bad blocks.


Other posts have attributed this to a memory problem. I ran the normal Memory test in BIOS, which checked out fine.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

-Anthony


The laptop has the current configuration:
IBM ThinkPad 755CE
48 Megs of Ram
1.2 Gig Hard Drive
486/66 Processor
PCMCIA NIC Card (SohoWare)

Anthony,

I have RH 8.0 loaded on my tp600. Never had issues with the install, but I loading right from the CDROM.

Though I don't think I can provide you with a definative answer to you issue, it sounds like a partitioning problem. If you haven't already, you might want to check out:

http://www.adamcon.org/~dmwick/thinkpad/
http://www.linux-thinkpad.org

I found that there were several other people out there that were dealing with thinkpad specific issues and were also willing to help lost souls.

With the 600, there was a BIOS issue where I had to disable the quick start feature to make it boot properly.

Brian