Odd behaviour with a Dell Optiplex 740 and RHEL5

[Stephen John Smoogen]

The Dell Optiplex 740 is the AMD tree of the Dell line, and we got our
first one this week. In trying to install the system with Tikanga we
have had nothing but problems.

On a 64 bit install, the OS hangs early on during the installation. A
similar problem is seen the x86_32 install where we see it hang during
the part where anaconda looks for dependencies. Switching to alt-f2
gets no-where as the box is in a pretty hard spot (any command typed
just hangs forever).

When booting the system into rescue mode, we have noticed that only 3
gb of the 4 are being seen.. which leads to the idea that we are
seeing some sort of acpi problem as we saw in the HP systems last year
with 4.4 and with some Sun AMD systems.

In trying a acpi=off temporary workaround, we lost control of the USB
mouse pretty early on in the install (thank goodness the USB keyboard
still worked.) The system got further in the install but failed with a
pop-up window saying: Unable to unmount /dev/sdb.. blah blah check
tty2 blah blah.

At this point the keyboard was gone and the system needed a hard power-off.

Disks:     2 sata drives
Memory: 4GB [though only 3 seen in Linux]
BIOS is 1.0.5

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"