Install hangs after "loop: registered device at major 7"

[crownleaf]

Greetings,

I have tried installing Slackware 7.1 and also Red Hat 7.0 on an old 100Mhz DX 486 box. It has an old CD-ROM (4x, me thinks). Anyway, for both distributions, booting off their respective floppies, I get a standard output on screen until the following line:

loop: registered device at major 7

after which time the PC simply hangs, doesn't go anywhere, and installation ceases.

Not sure what the problem is. I'm new at Linux. Don't know what is meant by "loop", "registered device", or "major 7".

I've read something about passing parameter at boot time, but not sure if that's something I need to do.

Thanks for any help.

Mark

 

[ifincham]

Hi,



This message relates to the system having created a loopback device (a major 7 block device). This is a normal message during initialisation. The failure would be after that..



It could be that the system fails trying to mount an initrd (initial read disk) or other .img file. During installs the loopback device is used to mount such non-block filesystems, i.e compressed filesystems containing drivers, etc. Other than that, I would guess that neither installer likes that cd-rom or even the other ide drives. If you have these connected to a promise card or suchlike you would need extra drivers at boot time. If its not that you could try unplugging the cdrom to see if it gets any further.



Hope this helps

 

[crownleaf]

Thank you ifincham,

I'll try unplugging the CD-ROM. For Slackware there are other bootdisk images that I may try, so maybe that might help. With Red Hat, it'll probably be more work (maybe? we'll see). I'm just getting started, so hopefully with some digging I can get this box up.

Mark