Touchy hardware during installation

[Kirsle]

I'm wondering if anyone else has seen anything like this:

During the installation of redhat-based systems, certain hardware will work in the end only depending on if I provoked it or not during the install.

For instance, my laptop has an onboard audio card (I'm not sure of the brand right offhand), but it usually works fine using ALSA. During the firstboot setup, if I tell it to test the sound card, it will work and play the test sound. But then it won't work ever again after that. However, if I don't test it, then it will continue to work after firstboot is completed. This is with CentOS 5.

Similarly, on Fedora 8 on my PC at work, sometimes the network would stall to a halt for no reason, and then any attempt to ifdown/ifup would result in a kernel panic. This behavior seemed random, but if it was giving this behavior during the time of the install from the LiveCD, the network was doomed to that fate forever until it's reinstalled. So I'd have to boot the LiveCD, surf the web for 15 or 20 minutes and make sure the network doesn't stall out and stop working after a few minutes, and then install to the hard drive.

It seems like if you provoke certain hardware (or not provoke it) during the installation/setup of a redhat box, that it dictates whether the hardware is going to actually work when you need it to. Anybody seen anything like this?

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[MikeHalloran]

Yes. My older ThinkPad is getting pretty long in the tooth. Both the hard drive and the CD drive occasionally generate errors that screw up RedHat installations. Same deal as you with audio also.

I managed to squeeze FC4 onto it by using a network share for temporary storage, but it was just too slow.

It runs Puppy and DSL just fine. I'll reinstall them if I need to.

I'm now in the process of installing Xubuntu. Going around behind the install using the alternate console shows that disk errors and network errors are happening, but Xubuntu is being persistent, or stubborn, and has not yet given up.

 

[MikeHalloran]

Update: I couldn't get Xubuntu to install from an 'alternative' CD. It seemed to think the CD drive was defective. So I tried installing via broadband starting with a mini-iso. Xubuntu seemed to think all the repositories were damaged, and couldn't find a way to use any of them. Also tried using the alternative CD as a repository, on an adjacent laptop. I couldn't figure out how to make that happen.

The CD drive is old, and very slow by today's standards, but it worked well enough to install Centos5, which is now updating itself.