Topic: Installation on AMD

[Edward]

hello i have downloaded 5.6 and burnt it to CD. i can boot off the cd and start the installation, but then this happens:

"unhandled exception occured

'blah blah bah'

line 537, in __call__
     db =rpm.opendb(0, id.instpath)
rpm.error: cannot open"

i cannot continue from this point. i have check that the cd is un corrupt and it is fine. my brother says red hat seems to have trouble with AMD according to his experiences with it.

any ideas on how to get it going?

ed

[CH Cheah]

My system is an AMD Duron 1400+ with VIA chipset & it's working fine.

[Kelvin]

I've installed quite a number of AMD based SME servers now. I have not had any problems yet.

Kelvin

[dave]

Hi Edward,

I have to go along with the other posts here, I've installed to an AMD system without problems.  

Right now I am running RH 8.(something, I forget which) and have no problems.

I know message after message saying 'it works fine for me' doesn't help so I'll make some suggestions also:

Reset all BIOS settings to defaults, normally there's a setting on the first BIOS screen allowing this, it's different for different vendors but most have this.  Some vendors have something like 'performance defaults' and 'safe defaults' choose safe.  Once things boot and load, you can experiment with different settings that may improve performance.

You could try alternate BIOS settings for your CD, I'm working from memory here but there are usually different modes listed.  Same thing for your HDD(s) - this is assuming all disk subsystems are IDE.  

I've seen problems regarding video modes and memory settings throw up seeming unrelated error messages.  Regardless of what BIOS options are available as above, I'd turn off all caching that can be turned off - caching related to BIOS segments, leave any processor cache settings on.  

If you have an AGP card, and there's a BIOS option to choose default video startup mode, whatever it's at choose the oposite (if it's set to AGP, choose PCI/VGA or vice versa - don't choose lesser video modes like EGA/CGA/MONO if it's available, that will produce other errors).

I know these are pretty generic suggestions but without more specific system info, this is where I'd start.

[CH Cheah]

Doing a search I found the following post

http://www.mail-archive.com/devinfo@lists.e-smith.org/msg11636.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/devinfo@lists.e-smith.org/msg11637.html

seems that he has a similar problem. Best that I can say is try to zero out
your hdd before trying to reinstall. e-smith will then see it as uninitialized.
A small utility that I often use is insthelp.exe