I've attempted to upgrade using 100MHz FSB for the first time. The new CPU is an AMD500K2, the Motherboard a Gigabyte GA-5AX (Rev5.2.x) (with ALi Aladdin chipset and Award bios) and a 64MB DIMM (100MHz). The machine is a standalone one with Win95 on a small partition on hda, Debian 2.1 (kernels 2.2.1 and 2.2.12) on hdb, and two other distros on smaller partitions. In the past, I've been lucky with upgrading - this time, however, I've problems and a puzzle.
Not wanting to put Debian at risk, I tried to boot Windows - no go and I could not use safe mode. I re-studied the M/Board Manual and checked the bios settings, finding nothing which appeared untoward to me (I'm still very inexperienced!). I re-installed W95 and still got the same errors. MS-DOS 6.2 installed OK and seemed fine (not that I have much experience of it). At this point, and in frustration, I decided to see if Debian would give me any error messages which might help. I booted from a floppy (I don't use LILO - don't fully understand it yet), and 2.2.1 put me right into KDE with no apparent problem. dmesg shows the CPU and Ram correctly (I had 96Mb of 66MHz EDO before) - the only change from normal other than expected ones was 'unknown IDE controller on PCI bus 00 -device 78'. I was able to do a lot of work - every program was OK and the speed appeared greater. As I use W95 basically for printing, there was no immediate problem. I rebooted a couple of times to check things and they were OK. However, when I came to shutdown, things went normal to start with but the system hung following messages (abbreviated):- 'unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 0000893d', 'current ->tss.cr3= etc', '*pde= etc', '0ops=0000', 'CPU 0, EIP: xxxx, EFLAGS: xxxx, eax etc' 'process halt (pid:395, process nr 17, stackpage= xxxx' 'stack etc (lots of addresses)' 'Call trace xxxx' 'Code xx xx xx' - hangs at this point After switching off, the system can be booted again without difficulty - there's no problem with mounting fs's -they were shut down correctly. I've looked at the newsgroup for the motherboard, but found nothing to help - there are 1000's of postings, but no easy way of searching that I can discover. Can anyone offer any help or suggestions - particularly about the puzzle with Debian. I have the usual CD with 'millions' of drivers, but as all are written for Windows - I haven't been able to try the ALi IDE ones - DOS doesn't want to know so with my limited knowledge I'm stymied. Grateful for any assistance, John.
