Puppy CD won't boot - kernel panic

[aahhaaa]

A friend has an older Dell desktop that she rarely uses but completely doesn't understand.
It came with XPsp2, but somewhere around the recent sp3 download, it acquired a bad case of Blue Screen of Death.

In fiddling with XP, a variety of 'not found' error messages showed up; the XP system disc failed also.

I thought Puppy, running without the HD, would diagnose if this was a hardware or software problem (plus she'd be not much more ignorant of Puppy than she was of XP) and she'd want to use Puppy from then on for the obvious reasons.

Puppy has always loaded in the past, this time it got to Process ksoftirqd and then a bunch of Stack readouts, a Call Trace, and then said
Kernel Panic- Not Synching- Fatal Exception in Interrupt

I'm thinking this is a hardware fault for sure, unless its in BIOS, but I'm way beyond my knowhow here.

Any advice on what kind of hardware fault would let an OS almost load?

[mikeb]

hmm....memory or motherboard would be my first thoughts...re-seat the ram sticks and look out for swollen caps but the former is more likely.

If there are 2 sticks try just one.

mike

[Flash]

By "the XP system disc failed" do you mean the XP installation CD won't boot? If that's the case, you most probably do have a hardware problem.

What version of Puppy are you trying to boot? Will the Puppy CD boot in any other computer?

[aahhaaa]

mikeb- thanks, I hadn't thought of RAM contact tarnish! Will try checking, as AP said they found a broken stick causing it.

flash- yeah, I went through the rota many times; XP kept changing its error messages each time. The XP installation disc itself crashes into blue screen gibberish, including 'dirty drive'. XP clearly has no internal routine to ID this prob.

I tried the Puppy 4 disc, (the same I've used fine on several computers) to clearly diagnose whether the Dell Dimension 4700 was failing due to hardware or software- as Puppy wouldn't involve the hd or its contents.

Uhmm... I didn't title this thread this way, someone changed it; and all I was asking was, what the obscure linux error message meant, as the machine was clearly failing before Puppy was tried- I don't expect Puppy to bring'em back from the dead! The new title seems somehow unfair to Puppy...

For any curious, this message seems to show up lately on other distros, on old machines and new, but the final 'Truth is still out there'.

Here's a couple other spots KP is discussed:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... ng-386732/

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=139843

[hondadream]

I had the same problem trying to boot a brand new Compaq CQ61 [Vista Home Basic] laptop. The disk worked well on an old Dell PC with XP.. go figure. I do like Puppy Linux however.