# [SOLVED]: 2.6 won't boot on laptop with 32 Megs of RAM?

## eno2001

I'm not too sure what the problem is, but I've got a Toshiba Satellite from 1998 with 32 megs of RAM.  I can successfully boot the minimal install CD and get Gentoo onto the laptop.  I built the base system and things were looking good.  I then got the kernel on using gentoo-sources and a manual build at first.  (I have Grub on the system)  When I attempted to boot, grub popped up and everything looked good.  It then went to boot the kernel and the screen went black and the laptop restarted.

I then tried using genkernel and appended the appropriate kernel params for the kernel I built.  I tried again and I got the same result, a black screen and then just a system reset.  No evidence that the kernel ever tried to boot.  This is a Pentium MMX 233 system with 32 megs of RAM.  It doesn't seem that these requirements are "too low" for Gentoo 2006.1.  Does anyone have any idea what I could look at on the system to find out what the problem might be?Last edited by eno2001 on Thu Apr 05, 2007 4:14 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## eccerr0r

most of the times the "blank screen" and spurious reset issues I've tracked down to binaries not being compiled properly for the machine, or bad video console drivers.  Make sure you're compiling CFLAGS are correct for your machine.

Did you see the kernel execute anything at all? "Uncompressing..."

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## seventhguardian

Or maybe ACPI issues. Try disabling ACPI and try it out. ACPI is a source of headaches for older laptops...

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## Jaglover

Black screen and reset usually happens if you try to execute i686 code on an i585 (or lower).

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## eno2001

Here's the last thing I see before the spontaneous reboot:

```
Booting 'Gentoo 2006.1 (Kernel 2.6.19)'

root (hd0,0)

  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type is 0x83

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.19-gentoo-r5 root=/dev/hda2 splash=silent

    [Linux-bzImage, setup=0x1c00, size=0x1b94ea]
```

I'm pretty sure everything was compiled properly for my arch.  The laptop is a Pentium MMX 233 with 32 megs of RAM.  I took the advice of someone else on the forums as I was having trouble compiling gcc 4 on this system and did a chroot build on a VM.  I tested there and the same exact system can boot with no problem.  So I actually have one kernel built on the laptop itself from before I tried a cross-compile and the one above was created in the VM where it worked but it doesn't work on the laptop.  The results whether compiled directly on the laptop or in the VM are identical on the laptop: boot fails.  On the VM both kernels work fine.

Here are my compile variables from /etc/make.conf:

```
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=i586 -pipe"

CHOST="i586-pc-linux-gnu"

CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

```

Oddly, the system works fine when booted from the Gentoo minimal CD-ROM.  I remember that there used to be instructions on getting the kernel from the CD-ROM to install on the system.  But I can't find anything about that anywhere now.  I would like to try it since it would prove once and for all whether or not this problem is actually an issue with the hardware or not.

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> most of the times the "blank screen" and spurious reset issues I've tracked down to binaries not being compiled properly for the machine, or bad video console drivers.  Make sure you're compiling CFLAGS are correct for your machine.
> 
> Did you see the kernel execute anything at all? "Uncompressing..."

 

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## Jaglover

What CPU did you choose in kernel config?

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## eno2001

In the case of both 2.6.18 and 2.6.19 series kernels I chose "Pentium MMX" from menuconfig which shows up in the .config file as:

CONFIG_M586MMX=y

So I'm pretty sure that's right.  I built the kernel without ACPI, but I've also tried booting with the "acpi=off" flag.  Based on what I'm seeing at boot though, it looks to me like the kernel never actually even tries to boot, or it crashes so quickly that all I see is the last Grub message.  I'm still kind of perplexed that it can boot fine from the Gentoo minimal CD.  So that implies that 2.6 series kernels can run on it.  At this  point I'm thinking I might wind up going back to a version of the kernel that matches what is included on the 2006.1 minimal CD.  Maybe it has something to do with newer kernels?

 *Jaglover wrote:*   

> What CPU did you choose in kernel config?

 

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## eccerr0r

get rid of any "silent" or "quiet" options and see if there's any debug messages that can be used to debug this...

Here's an example problem I'm still trying to figure out myself.  I have a disk that boots perfectly fine on a P3 motherboard but hangs when running on a 486.  The kernel was compiled fine as it got through boot with all the usual messages, but hung when booting init...

I probably still have my cflags wrong for either libc or busybox...   :Sad: 

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## eno2001

OK.  I rebuilt the kernel again and completely took out APM, ACPI and FBDEV stuff.  The kernel booted.  So now, I want to find out which of those things was causing the problem.  The laptop's BIOS claims to be ACPI.  But it's from 1998, so it's likely old, broken ACPI.  I will leave the legacy APM stuff disabled.  (They were both set up as modules before).  I'd really like to use the FBDEV, but even the Gentoo minimal install CD produced an FB that is too large to display on the 800x600 monitor.  I'll have to play around with this a bit.  But at least I can boot the system from my kernel now.  Only in single user mode though.  Seems to hang on PCMCIA initialization in default runlevel...  But that's for another day.

For the time being I'm going to experiment with recompiling first with ACPI support and seeing if it boots or crashes.  If it boots, then I'll try FBDEV.  I'll post my findings here.

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## eno2001

I recompiled with ACPI support and all seems to be fine.  Of special note is that I DIDN'T build APM along with ACPI and I also skipped enabling the "legacy power management" option.  I also disabled some of the more modern portions of ACPI (CPU speed control, power management timer, etc...) assuming they might not have interacted well with the ACPI on this laptop from 1998.  So this is just purely ACPI.  Next... to try it with FBDEV.  If FBDEV works, then I'm going to suspect some kind of nastiness with either the simultaneous enabling of ACPI and APM, or some of the newer features in ACPI that' I've since disabled.  Since I'm on my way, I'm marking this thread as SOLVED.  Thanks for all the help to everyone!

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