I have an HP Pavilion P6000 that is currently running openSuse 11.4, without any (apparent) problem.
I tried to upgrade to 12.1 from a disk I made quite a while ago - the media verified okay - but the machine would reboot while trying to load the kernel for installation. The firmware check did the same thing. Thinking there might be a problem with the disk, I made a new disk for 12.3. Same problem - I select “installation”, the kernel starts to load, the system reboots.
I ran the memory test (okay, only 1 pass) - but it passed. However, the firmware test wasn’t so good - I got a whole string of “fails”
Fail - MTRR validation
Fail - DMI information check - no SMBIOS nor DMI
Fail - EDD boot disk hunting
Fail - OS/2 memory hole between 15-16 MB
Fail - HPET configuration
Fail - CPU frequency scaling ( on all 4 CPUs)
I wasn’t able to find a usable BIOS update on the HP website - they only have .exe files
Is there any way to upgrade this system or am I going to have to keep it at 11.4?
> I wasn’t able to find a usable BIOS update on the HP website - they
> only have .exe files
Well, if you need to apply the update and only .exe are available, I
would use it. I think they should run from dos, perhaps even freedos;
perhaps you do not need a full windows system.
> Is there any way to upgrade this system or am I going to have to keep
> it at 11.4?
If you can not boot a live system of 12.1, 12.2, or 12.3, it is useless
to attempt the upgrade.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
Now consider that your problem might be hardware related. Something as simple as dirt in your Optical drive could do it and any computer over one year old is due for a good cleaning. If you could borrow an external DVD player, you might give it a try. One thing is for sure, if a LiveCD does not load, its not going to be a good idea to replace your working openSUSE 11.4 copy with it. Consider that good cleaning and consider a different or new DVD player. You can always look to installing a newer kernel, to see if that is the problem and or to find one that works. My SAKC bash script could install any kernel you wanted to try. Have a look at this article on kernels: openSUSE and Installing New Linux Kernel Versions - Blogs - openSUSE Forums
On 04/17/2013 10:06 PM, n hand wrote:
> or am I going to have to keep it at 11.4?
like the others i can only guess what the problem is…but, if you
elect to stay with 11.4 you should right away move to Evergreen as
the basic 11.4 has had no security updates for some months…see the
way here: http://tinyurl.com/4aflkpy
openSUSE 11.4 Evergreen will continue to receive security updates
until July 2014…its what i’m running…
being the adventurous & foolhardy type… (& since for some reason I didn’t see all the responses)
after running the firmware test I made a couple of changes to the settings, then ran it again & failed again. But the installation program put me in the old “DOS”-mode installer (instead of the fancy GUI) & I elected to upgrade.
everything LOOKS to be working fine. The display was a little wonky & took some tweaking but, the Wacom tablet works (better than before), the screen now looks lovely (though I’m not convinced I like the “Obsidian” theme), my files are still here - I’m a happy camper right now
On 2013-04-19 00:06, n hand wrote:
>
> being the adventurous & foolhardy type… (& since for some reason I
> didn’t see all the responses)
>
> after running the firmware test I made a couple of changes to the
> settings, then ran it again & failed again. But the installation program
> put me in the old “DOS”-mode installer (instead of the fancy GUI) & I
> elected to upgrade.
>
> everything -LOOKS- to be working fine. The display was a little wonky &
> took some tweaking but, the Wacom tablet works (better than before), the
> screen now looks lovely (though I’m not convinced I like the “Obsidian”
> theme), my files are still here - I’m a happy camper right now
Congratulations
Interesting learning, that the text mode install/upgrade could succeed.
Then what you had was a graphical problem, I guess…
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
With an older nVIDIA video card 9500, I am only able to install openSUSE 12.3 in text mode. After the install, the GUI comes up, but often blows up with a kernel ops. If I then upgrade the kernel to 3.8, it works OK with open source driver. So there are graphic issues with kernel 3.7 that can only be over come in a text mode install and a prompt kernel upgrade to 3.8 after the openSUSE 12.3 install is complete.
I have an nVIDIA 210 - so it’s probably a similar issue. I just installed updated video drivers so maybe the last little oddities will go away with the display.
next issue - why the synaptiks driver seems to be having problems - maybe I’ll try going into “repair installation” so see if that helps.
