Hello,

My Dell Precision 410 won't boot 2.6.X smp kernel.

I have a Precision 410 with dual 750MHz PIIIs. 1 Gig RAM, 200 Gig Seagate
HD, older ATI video card (Rage I believe).

I installed Deb Sarge with a 2.4.X smp kernel. Worked great and was very
fast.

Well I put in the larger drive and wanted to install Debian again to use
as my main system. It seems MUCH faster than my 2800 Sempron, 512 Meg, ECS
KT-600A MB. May just be the extra memory.

Anyway, I wanted to play with the 2.6 kernel so I used linux26 at the boot
prompt. Installed the base system. Even the network was detected. It works
great and was very snappy. No X server installed yet. Just cli.

I did an apt-get dist-upgrade and then installed the smp kernel. No error
messages. The machine was running fine. When I rebooted to use the smp
kernel it stopped at "Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel". Just
froze there. I rebooted back to the non-smp 2.6.X kernel and it worked
great. I turned off the built in SCSI and same thing.

I read through google to turn off acpi in the bios. Done-still won't boot
with any of the 2.6 smp kernels.

It worked great with the 2.4 smp kernel I had on it earlier.

Here's the funny part. I played with this thing for quite a while (2-3
hours) a couple nights ago. Installed a couple of 2.6.X smp kernels and
tried them and removed and reinstalled them and tried again. Then today I
was typing a message to this newsgroup to ask for some help. I was
gathering data for my post and I wanted to give the kernel versions I
tried. I went to debian.org and got the version numbers of the 2.6.X smp
kernels. Let's see one of the kernels I installed was
kernel-image-2.6.8-2-k7-smp........ Oh shoot?! I didn't.......
can't........dam#%$

Anyway, most anyone can see what I did already. I installed an AMD kernel
in my Intel machine. Actually I installed a few AMD kernels on my machine. ;-)

I'm awake now. I can't believe I did that.

Just thought someone would get a kick out of it.

I had a 30Gig HD in this machine that I put Debian 2.4.X-smp kernel on the
first time. Worked like a charm. I erased it to play with FreeBSIE. I
installed that and wanted to play with FreeBSD for a while. I guess I'm
either hooked or too lazy to want to learn a new os. I just can't get over
how easy Debian is when you know very little. I put my large HD in and am
staying with Debian.

BTW: It boots quickly now with a 686-smp kernel.

Steve