I have two old PCs, one with a 1GHz Celeron on an Intel 815 chipset mobo and the other with an AMD K6/475 processor on an ALI chipset mobo. Both have 256M RAM. I have installed 2.2 on both of them and get the same (intermittent) fault during boot. I am not exactly sure what the error is because it scrolls of the screen before and can read all of it but it is something to do with a superblock problem.  The screen then frezzes and any key press causes a reboot. Boot is succesful about one time in four.I have tried  different file systems with the same results. I have swapped drives and memory with no success. I have installed Slack 10.1 and 10.2 with no problems as well as Kubuntu.

The only difference I can think of is that Zenwalk uses a 2.6.x kernel whereas all the other distros I have loaded are still 2.4.x

Any ideas?



Ian

Kubuntu uses 2.6 too if I'm correct. Btw - I'm moving this to problems :-). Superblock thingies don't sound like a bug to me .

I've checked the Kubuntu site and you are right is uses  2.6.12.6 so that is unlikely to be the problem.

I don't mind where is it posted so long as there's a good chance of solving the problem. xfce on these machines is a dream, especialy the celeron with the Intel graphics which gives a really crisp image, so I would really like to get this sorted. I use Slackware on my other machine so it's familiar territory.

I have done a lot of testing and I am really puzzled by this. Part of the error message advises using fsck which then reports the partition is clean. I have downloaded disk tools , checked the drives and even low level formatted them. I have installed many different distros on this hardware and they all work except Zenwalk.

Ian

I have re-installed another two times. I was a bit suspicious of udev as this may be the only difference between Zenwalk and the other distros that I have tried. |so I disabled udev during install and booting was fine every time. However X was broken because /dev/agp could not be found. So I reinstalled with udev enabled and, fingers crossed, it all seems to work OK now. I'll keep rebboting just to check.

This message came from Zenwalk 2.2 running xfce ona 1GHz Celeron running on an Intel 815 mobo.



Ian

For completeness I should mention that on the last install I did select the xfs file system which I had never done before. I'll do a check install on the other machine to see if this has any bearing on the problem.

Ian