RHEL 5 install on HP 8000 Elite

[wilville]

Hi, all

I am trying to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on an HP 8000 Elite machine with no luck at all. I have tried RHEL5.1 and RHEL5.4 with identical results. I have tried a boot from an install disk and from a PXE server with identical results...

I am trying to install the workstation version, not the server version. Server is not appropriate to the use this box will get.

I get started booting up the installer and that boot gets to the point of freeing initrd memory and then the following few messages:
NET: Registered protocol family 16
ACPI: bus type pci registered
PCI: Using MMCONFIG at f4000000
ACPI: Interpreter enabled
ACPI: Using IOAPIC for interrupt routing
ACPI: PCI Root Bridge [PCI0] (0000:00)

And then it hangs...
... and hangs ...
... and ...

I have tried looking in Setup to see if ACPI was controllable at the BIOS level as I have found it on some other machines, but it does not seem to be. Then again, it may not actually be ACPI giving me trouble. I am afraid I am about out of good ideas. Anyone have any suggestions to get past this?

Thanxx,
Wilville

 

[ady2012]

Try centos 5.5 livecd or reset the BIOS to default and try to install again.
Good luck...

 

[wilville]

Hi, again

Well this plot has thickened. I ran on a live CentOS CD just to be sure and then I tried a full up CentOS 5.4 install on that machine, but without powering down to start the boot to the installer, and lo and behold it worked. Then to see if I was getting delusional at that late hour, I tried the RHEL 5.4 install right away, without shutting off the machine this time, and it also worked. I tried a power down to start the boot to the installer process, and it failed. I booted a live CD and that worked. Thereafter the RHEL installer booted just fine as long as I did not power down to start it. This machine apparently has something get funky at power up initialization that a few minutes of running seems to straighten out. At least I hope that is it since about the only other theory I can see is some mythical beasts frolicking in my lab. Sigh! ;^)

Wilville

 

[Annihilannic]

Have you tried the noacpi kernel command-line option?

Annihilannic.

 

[ady2012]

What error message did you get after you turned off HP server?

 

[wilville]

After shutting down the system completely, I get the error documented in my first post all over again.

I am hoping to get a little time to try out noacpi sometime today. Intended to yesterday, but no time. Such is this job.

 

[3t0n1c]

Turn off all of your "power management" stuff from BIOS, then reboot and try again.

Also doing what Annihilannic suggested may help also.

linux: boot noacpi <ENTER>

Good luck!