ubuntu 6.10 install hangs on IBM Thinkpad T42p

I'm sorry to hear your problem. I do not think that the Alternate CD will resolve your problem, but you might try anyway.

I suspect you are seeing a problem where the installer is attempting to check a FAT32 file system. There are a few problems with the checking tool - which I happen to be working on.

The very first thing I would do is to make sure that there are no actual errors on the partition by running the Windows drive check.

Of course, your machine may not have Windows on it at all, in which case we'll need to gather some more information.

Let us know.

The drive is currently blank (new machine). I had the install script "Erase the entire partition" and it is formatting a ext3 file system. I seem to get past that point OK.

-Scott

Scott,

During the installation, while it's "hung", can you open up a Terminal window, Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal, and type this command:

tail /var/log/syslog

If you can show us what it says, we'll have some more information to figure out what is going on. I would also point out that I'm unable to find any reports with people having any major problems with the model laptop you're using, so I'm expecting that we'll be able to solve your challenge.

Also, if you are able to provide the IBM model number of the laptop, which version of the T42p, that way we can see what other hardware you have.

And for your future reference, www.thinkwiki.org is a useful resource to know about.

Scott, others,
I am very interested to find out if/how you were able to resolve. I am seeing basically the same problem with my Dell Optiplex GX1 when installing Ubuntu 6.10. My install hangs around 40-50% through during 'Copying Files' . Everything basically locks and there is no cursor or key response so I have to take it down hard. I did notice that my BIOS is not the latest so I was going to pursue updating it but not very confident this will be the fix.

One other note, during the the boot of the live cd I was getting a loop of i/o hdc errors. I had to add irqpoll to my boot parameters <F6> to resolve that. Do I also need to add parameters for the install? I didn't see a place to do so.

neilo--
This turned out to be a bad memory DIMM. The laptop diagnostics did not find it, but the memory check included on Alternate CD found it! I replaced the memory and the install went normally, and the system is working fine now.

-Scott

Scott,
Thanks for the info. I must have had a different problem than yours but with similar effects. For the benefit of those that have my problem. Here is what worked for me:

I booted from from the Live cd using the parameters of irqpoll noapic nolapic . I appended these parameters to the default parameters that appear when selecting F6 from the main screen during the Live cd boot. I don't know exactly why these resolve my problem but I noticed others having symptoms like mine had used these. This did the trick as the Live boot worked and then I was able to also install with no more lockups.

Ubuntu is great because I had been running Fedora 6 and was getting frustrated because my sound board took weeks to get sound, music cds would not play, the Skype mic would not record sound, etc, etc. etc. With Ubuntu, I had all of these installed and running instantly much like a Windows install. I was also able to easily install Gcompris for my daughter from the Add/Remove Applications. It was painless so far I am very impressed and enthused about using Ubuntu.

Thanks again - Neil