On Thursday, July 7, 2005, at 10:37 AM, Blake Vance wrote:
Youch! Older NEC 333 MHz, 192 MB RAM PC had been chugging along with CentOS 4 until I ran up2date. After retrieving all 119 MB of openoffice.org-il8n-1.1.2..., PC hung (mouse/KB nonresponsive). Reboot yielded "Press <Ctrl-B> to select MBA boot method [2 options] (Default is PXE)". Option 1 for boot using TriROM: "MSD: no reply, then Rx2 Rx2 ... File server could not be found" Option 2 using Preboot Execution Environment (PXE): "DHCP MAC ADDR: 00 10 4B 39 03 D0 PXE-E52: No IP address received from DHCP or BOOTP. PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE. Operating System not found" Any suggestions, before I reinstall OS? Might I have been running up against a memory shortage on the package retrieval?
It sounds more like a hardware problem. Without diagnosing the computer first hand, I suggest running SpinRite [http://grc.com/spinrite.htm] on the hard drive first, then do a memtest and then run something like Stress Linux [http://www.stresslinux.org/] or some stress test utilities on the Ultimate Boot CD.
All the programs listed above are Free or Open Source except SpinRite which costs $89. I'd be willing to run it on your drive this Saturday at McKinley from 10am. Email me if your interested.
I've also had problems with yum/up2date on CentOS 4, which combined with other problems was enough reason to switch to something else. In this particular case, I switched to Debian.
Michael
