Dell Inspiron Desktop

Issues related to hardware problems
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mjr_5
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Dell Inspiron Desktop

Post by mjr_5 » 2018/03/09 16:27:18

My old (2005) disk was fried due to pwr surge. Was running CentOS 6 so I want to buy a new system that will run 7.4. Does anyone see any problems with a 7th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-7400 processor (6MB Cache, up to 3.50 GHz), Intel® UHD Graphics 630, 1TB (64MB Cache) 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s,Dell Wireless 1707 Card 802.11bgn + Bluetooth 4.0 ?

I just use Firefox, Thunderbird email mostly, nothing fancy or advanced. Thanks.

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TrevorH
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Re: Dell Inspiron Desktop

Post by TrevorH » 2018/03/09 17:39:33

Personally I'd try to get something with an intel wireless card but others can be persuaded to work with a big enough hammer...
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

mjr_5
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Re: Dell Inspiron Desktop

Post by mjr_5 » 2018/03/14 14:42:03

I asked about one system then bought another. Dell XPS 8920. I tried to install the DVD iso image and soon got many Dracut initqueue timeouts. sha256sum on the disk image on windows is good. explorer shows the files on the cd. My first question is how does one get the boot messages off the system to share here ? The emergency prompt suggested cp to a usb - I don't think the system is far enough along to access a thumb drive.

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TrevorH
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Re: Dell Inspiron Desktop

Post by TrevorH » 2018/03/14 15:42:27

The dracut initqueue messages when booting the install media are invariably caused by either a bad download, bad media or a bad utility being used to copy the iso image to the media. If you are using a USB stick to do the install then make sure you use one of the known-to-work utilities from http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey and not one of the broken ones. If you're using a DVD then make sure it wrote correctly.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

mjr_5
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Joined: 2018/03/08 15:48:47

Re: Dell Inspiron Desktop

Post by mjr_5 » 2018/03/14 19:42:16

I formatted on windows an 8GB USB as NTFS 512 Block Not Quick and downloaded dd-0.6beta3 dd.exe and ran dd if=CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1708.iso
of=\\?\Device\HarddiskVolume16 quite a while ago....we'll see.

How do I "make sure it wrote correctly" meaning the DVD burn ? It did boot and did give me much output.....

The USB stick booted and leaves me at the grub> line. Is this the expected result ? Now what ? I have a prefectly running windows (if that's possible) machine that I do want to install CentOS on but I need more confidence that I won't end up with neither :-)
Thanks for your help.

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TrevorH
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Re: Dell Inspiron Desktop

Post by TrevorH » 2018/03/14 21:29:56

The USB stick booted and leaves me at the grub> line. Is this the expected result ?
No. Is \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume16 your entire USB stick or a partition on it? It needs to be the whole device and all contents of it will be overwritten including any formatting which you may have done (unnecessarily).
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

mjr_5
Posts: 4
Joined: 2018/03/08 15:48:47

Re: Dell Inspiron Desktop

Post by mjr_5 » 2018/03/14 22:29:24

I think it's the whole stick. windows explorer can't see anything on it now and wants to format it. I used the dd --list as per the instructions and used the device it listed.

Retry: The USB stick is not showing up as an NT Block Device Object per the dd instructions. The cdrom is....

Got win32diskimager.exe. Worked great. Now from the USB stick boot I have a graphic Welcome to CentOS 7. screen. Onward. :D

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