Bartender

Good day to everyone -
Our main PC is a homebrew P4 3GHz on an ASUS P5GDC-V Deluxe motherboard. 80 GB SATA HDD, 2GB of name-brand RAM. Pretty basic. Runs W2K. This PC has been as reliable as an anvil.

But try putting a Linux LiveCD in the DVD tray and it gets very flaky. Have tried all the 'buntus, MEPIS, a couple of Mint distros. I get a strange error message "irqpoll - nobody cared" while the disc tries to load.

Most won't get to a desktop at all, but MEPIS 6.5 and Mint KDE will if I put in "noapic" as a boot option. However, searching for a hard drive from the desktop reveals nothing. I can go into KwikDisk or System and the LiveCD says there is no hard drive.

The only LiveCD to boot up without fiddling and to see the HDD is a year-old version of PCLOS.

Does anyone know what "irqpoll - nobody cared" means?

justo

I have ran into that before.You should also try PC Linux 2007. But I think if you change to another monitor you may get past it anyway. It hits a snag and often an oddball monitor is why.I have one oddball here that gives me problems.It is a Mocroscan 5 AP.

hal8000

Bartender, try appending irqpoll to the end of the kernel statement in grub, this
may allow you to boot other systems, ubuntu etc.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2099007

There are 847 pages of results on google for "irqpoll nobody cared", Ive not had time to look through them all but the post above was found on ubuntu forums.

Hope that helps

justo

I wonder why the guy put nobody cared? I think there could have been some information in that place that could have been more helpful. It is strange that when I changed monitors the Linux went on up to desktop.

Bartender

Hi, guys -

Both of your responses point to a pitiful level of problem-solving effort on the part of yours truly. I'd posted questions about this over the months at various forums but don't think I ever just googled it.

And justo, it never occurred to me that it might be the Dell LCD monitor - "irqpoll" sure sounded like something inside the PC, and if I got to a desktop the monitor has always worked fine.

I certainly have a few things to look into...

Thanks

justo

I use harware rather than brainware because I keep a lot of spare parts here.Often a small harware change saves a lot of headaches for me because I do not want to become a programer just to avoid dealing with MS.

Bartender

Reporting back -
Tried MEPIS 6.5 and Mint KDE DVD, both with "irqpoll" added as a boot option.

Wow

Both of them gave me a desktop without any grief, and both found the SATA hard drive. I'm used to the tortoise-like response my old PIII 450MHz test box gives with Linux OS'es installed to the HDD. The P4 flew, even though it was running from the LiveCD! Very exciting.
What a doofus I am. Been hung up on irqpoll for over a year.

Before I get brave/foolish and make room on our main PC for a Linux distro, I need to learn more about this irqpoll thing. How would that affect an installation to the HDD? Once it's installed, would everything work as normal, or would I have to make some sort of tweak to the installation, as hal8000's link indicates?

Bartender

Some further info for anyone who's interested - irqpoll may have something to do with the LiveCD expecting to find certain devices at certain IRQ's. If it doesn't find anything there it gets crossed up (?)

I don't know about this. I'm guessing. The irqpoll error I got mentioned IRQ5. Went back into Windows and found a list of IRQ's under Computer Managment. Windows isn't using IRQ5. IRQ5 is usually reserved for a second parallel port - which most PC's don't have - or a sound card. I'm using onboard sound so apparently that doesn't count.

Don't know why the LiveCD couldn't see the SATA drive without the irqpoll boot option.

justo

That is a problem with Linux.You run into something like that and have to spend a lot of time to research and find solutions.You have to sign up at the site of the Linux version then post the question then wait some days to get the correct answer on many problems..You can be sure if you had the problem then several others ran in to it also. But the correction is difficult to discover.The guy who made the note where the malfunction occured should have offered solutions on the screen.Linux programers must think we are all going to get a degree in Linux applications to load and use the products. They want to try to put a dent in Microsoft but continue to cater to other Linux specialist rather than go for simplicity which the average computer user wants.<> I went to Google.here is the typical Linux wild goose chase . I do not see the answer there at a quick glance.>> http://lists.xensource.com/archives/.../msg00117.html

justo

I was correcting my spelling up there and landed down here.