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I reported that BL3 would not boot (floppy or loop versions) but got 
endless lines of machine check exception errors on a Compaq Armada 1573DM 
laptop (233MHz, 32MB RAM).

BL2 boots - 2 floppy or ramdisk - with the standard zimage or the P1 
kernel.

I copied BL3 to ext2 partition via parallel zip drive (since llpro would 
not work via the parallel only the serial port, which I think would have 
taken about 10 hours).

BL3 ext2 boots fine with my laptop 2.4.31 kernel, or with the P1 kernel 
from BL2, but gets the Machine Check Errors with zimage or the P1 zimage 
from BL3.50.  I could not check BL3 loop or floppy with other kernels 
without redoing the floppies or the starting files for loop BL3 (if booted 
with a different kernel, loop BL3 is read-only).

BL2 ramdisk crashes the same way when booted with a 2.2.26 p1 kernel from 
BL3.50.

Other people reported these errors with other models of Compaq laptop
for various versions of kernel 2.4 or 2.6.  For instance 2.4.* would work 
but later versions would not.  The solution was to add 'nomce' when 
booting with lilo.  2.4.31 works (so it must have broken, been fixed, 
broken, been fixed...)

2.2.27rc2 changelog mentions this problem as being fixed in 2.2.27pre1.

"Disabled MCE only on Pentiums by default (2.4 backport).
(boot with 'mce' if your MCE works as expected)."

This means 2.2.27pre1 and later 2.2.27 ought to work on this laptop and 
similar ones.  And 2.2.26 should work if I disable mce while booting.
So I tried:

loadlin zimage root=/dev/hda3 rw nomce

This booted without the errors, to ext2 BL3.50 !!!!!
(I used the P1 kernel, actually). I have not tried loop linux nomce.


Steven, will you be updating BL3.5 to BL3.6 with a 2.2.27 kernel?

If not, could you add 'nomce' to the lilo fd setup in the next version, 
and nomce to the loadlin line in the boot batch file for loop and ext2 
linux?

I thought this computer was unusable with BL3 for the past year because of 
the mce problem.

The pcmcia network card worked after I added the module and edited config. 
I transferred via floppy disk and the 'send/receive' program is sending 
BL2 to /dev/hda4.




Sindi Keesan