Arch Linux

Fill1890

Member

Registered: 2014-09-30

Posts: 1

Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300 Boot

I have an old Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300, with 384MB (128 + 265) of RAM, 12GB of HDD space, an S3 Savage IX graphics adapter, and a Mobile Pentium III. The DVD drive wasn't working (I'm not sure why; it works in my other computer and it's the original drive, I tried to fix the error but couldn't) and the BIOS doesn't support booting from a USB, so to install Arch Linux I removed the HDD, connected it to my computer, booted from the Arch install DVD and installed Arch without any problems. I originally installed GRUB as the bootloader, but GRUB crashed after loading with no output, so I installed Syslinux. Using  Syslinux, the boot prompt opens (The UI fails to load).

The Problem: After I nominate 'arch' for the boot option, Syslinux loads vmlinux and initramfs successfully, however the computer then reboots.

My Progress: When I use 'archfallback' as the boot option, it outputs:

SYSLINUX 6.03 EDD 6.03-pre20* Copyright (C) 1994-2014 H. Peter Anvin et al
Failed to load COM32 file menu.c32
boot: archfallback
Loading ../vmlinuz-linux… ok
Loading ../initramfs-linux-fallback.img… ok
Probing EDD (edd=off to disable)… ok
early console in decompress_kernel

Decompressing Linux… Parsing ELF… No relocation needed… done.
Booting the kernel.

And the computer then reboots. When I boot for the first time (Not a reboot) the laptop displays a repeating pattern of red, green, black and white vertical stripes before it reboots.
Syslinux seems to be unable to any extra COM32 files, Poweroff and Reboot work but HDT and the menu don't. This may be a related problem, but as Syslinux loads vmlinuz and initramfs I don't think that it is the cause.

I've tried installing the savage-dri packages since I think this may be a graphics issue, but no luck.

Any suggestions for making it boot? Thanks in advance.

Update: After I installed savage-dri the laptop hangs after loading initramfs, with no more output and no reboot. nomodeset and acpi=off have no effect.

Update: After doing more research and after trying more things, I have this: The laptop requires acpi=off and nomodeset to at least start the boot process. No drivers are necessary as yet. Using mem=256M starts the kernel (I think), which then has a panic and displays the messages "kernel panic - not syncing: attempted to kill idle task!". The traceback is:

__free_pages+0x27/0x30
__free_pages_bootmem+0x69/0x6e
__free_memory_core+0x60/0x71
free_all_bootmem+0x5c/0xd9
mem_init+0x2c/0x19a
start_kernel+0x1d7/0x3bb
i386_start_kernel+0x79/0x7d

EIP: free_hot_cold_page+0xe3/0x140 SS:ESP 0068:c15b7f44

I'm not entirely sure what this means, but I assume that it is something to do with memory allocation.

Last edited by Fill1890 (2014-10-03 03:40:08)