Installation guide

Chapter 6. Troubleshooting

Installation on an Intel® or AMD

System

This appendix discusses some common installation problems and their solutions.

1. You are Unable to Boot Red Hat Enter-

prise Linux

1.1. Are You Unable to Boot With Your RAID Card?

If you have performed an installation and cannot boot your system properly, you may need to

reinstall and create your partitions differently.

Some BIOSes do not support booting from RAID cards. At the end of an installation, a text-

based screen showing the boot loader prompt (for example, GRUB: ) and a flashing cursor may

be all that appears. If this is the case, you must repartition your system.

Whether you choose automatic or manual partitioning, you must install your /boot partition out-

side of the RAID array, such as on a separate hard drive. An internal hard drive is necessary to

use for partition creation with problematic RAID cards.

You must also install your preferred boot loader (GRUB or LILO) on the MBR of a drive that is

outside of the RAID array. This should be the same drive that hosts the /boot/ partition.

Once these changes have been made, you should be able to finish your installation and boot

the system properly.

1.2. Is Your System Displaying Signal 11 Errors?

A signal 11 error, commonly know as a segmentation fault, means that the program accessed a

memory location that was not assigned to it. A signal 11 error may be due to a bug in one of the

software programs that is installed, or faulty hardware.

If you receive a fatal signal 11 error during your installation, it is probably due to a hardware er-

ror in memory on your system's bus. Like other operating systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

places its own demands on your system's hardware. Some of this hardware may not be able to

meet those demands, even if they work properly under another OS.

Ensure that you have the latest installation updates and images from Red Hat. Review the on-

line errata to see if newer versions are available. If the latest images still fail, it may be due to a

problem with your hardware. Commonly, these errors are in your memory or CPU-cache. A pos-

sible solution for this error is turning off the CPU-cache in the BIOS, if your system supports

this. You could also try to swap your memory around in the motherboard slots to check if the

problem is either slot or memory related.