[sf-lug] Why PcLinuxOS and Ubuntu failed to work on Emmanuel's laptop

[Matt Price]

On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 23:54 -0800, Kristian Erik Hermansen wrote:
> I thought everyone would enjoy this story.  Christian, Asheesh, and I
> were trying to get Emmanuel set up with his broken Windows laptop.
> Now, Christian had installed PcLinuxOS on Saturday at the event and I
> had noticed some weirdness.  Emmanuel resurfaced today at the SFLUG
> meeting to show us that he was having issues.  After looking it over,
> we decided to give Ubuntu a shot.  The Live CD appeared to be
> corrupted, but it was a pressed disc!  So we tried another disc, and
> that also failed!  We then tried to reinstall PCLinuxOS, but that also
> failed!  Then we tried booting the Ubuntu CD and manually copying over
> data from another installation and that also failed (kernel panic)!
> 
> Lesson learned?  Always memtest86+ the machine before going anywhere.
> There was bad RAM in the laptop :-)  So, Emmanuel needs to go get some
> new RAM, or work around it using the mem kernel option, but that was
> resulting in other issues we shouldn't even get into on this list :-P

well, that explains why a sweet laptop with a 100gig hard drive ended up
at goodwill, whcih is where emmanuel got it!

matt

-- 
Matt Price
matt.price at utoronto.ca