DBAN hangs at the very beginning

F

Fyr

New Member
Hi,

I'm trying to wipe a hard drive with DBAN but it hangs before it even starts.

The DBAN release I am using is dban-1.0.7.
The DBAN media that I am trying to use is CD-R
The computer is 333 MHz Pentium II (running at 450 MHz; motherboard jumper setting) on a Gigabyte GA686BX motherboard with 425984 kB of RAM and a Lite-On CD-ROM drive.

If I just press enter, or type in 'autonuke', or 'nosilent', or 'nofloppy' in the DBAN boot prompt, it hangs with the blue screen "wait 60 seconds..." and doesn't go any further. If I type 'autonuke' I see the following:

Loading kernel.bzi.................
Loading initrd.gz.....
Ready.
Uncompressing Linux with LZMA...
Ok, booting the kernel. Please wait 60 seconds for DBAN to start...
If the computer hangs here, then reset it and read the DBAN
troubleshooting hints by pushing F4 at the boot prompt.

Oops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010:[<c0124e31>] Not tainted
EFLAGS: 00010887
eax: d9fe9810 ebx: 1d739d00 ecx: d9fe9000 edx: d9f80000
esi: c147ff74 edi: 00000246 ebp: 000001f0 esp: c0365ee0
ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018
Process swapper (pid: 0, stackpage=c0365000)
Stack: d9feb800 00000000 d9f83600 d9feb800 c013d9b8 c147ff74

"and so on, and after that"

Call Trace: [<c013d9b8>] [<c013e9e6>] [<c013ecf5>] [<c0145a0b>] [<c0145b46>] [<c01311d9>] [<c013126d>] [<c0105000>] [<c01313e5>]

Code: 8b 44 81 18 03 59 0c 89 41 14 40 74 09 57 9d 89 d8 5b 5e 5f
<0>Kernel panic: Attempted to kill the idle task!
In idle task - not syncing


And that is where it hangs. The caps lock and scroll lock lights on the keyboard start (and keep on) blinking.
If I try to soft boot, the lights on the keyboard stop blinking, but other than that the computer does not react on anything except the reset button.

By typing in 'noverify', the error message looks about the same except that it starts with "Unable to handle kernel pagin request at virtual address 41f8f058
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0000 '....... and so on' "

If I type 'verbose' in the DBAN boot prompt, this is the last screen I get:

<0>Kernel panic: Attempted to kill the idle task!
In idle task - not syncing
<1>Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000010 printing eip:
c0117888
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010:[<c0117888>] Not tainted
EFLAGS: 00010203
eax: c14dc000 ebx: 00000001 ecx: 00000000 edx: 00000010
esi: c03bfa30 edi: fffffffe ebp: 00000046 esp: c14d9f18
ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018
Process (pid: 0, stackpage=c14d9000)
Stack: c0117b88 00000046 c14d9f78 c0117c7e 00000000 c03bfa30

"and so on, and after that"

Call Trace: [<c0117b88>] [<c0117c7e>] [<c0116086>] [<c0115fc3>] [<c0115e3b>] [<c01098a5>] [<c010bae0>] [<c0171de4>] [<c0113649>] [<c0114cf0>] [<c0108ada>] [<c0110730>]

Code: 8b 02 85 c0 74 06 8b 02 a8 02 74 06 81 c1 00 08 00 00 8b 52
<0>Kernel panic: Aiee, killing interrupt handler!
In interrupt handler - not syncing

And, again, that's where it hangs and the keyboards caps lock and scroll lock lights start blinking.

Do you have any ideas what might cause this? Do you have any suggestions how I could overcome the problem?

Thank you.
 
Hi Overwriter,

Thanks for your reply and your suggestion. The problem was not in the CD though. Nevertheless, I just found out that there was a defect in one of my RAM modules causing the problem. When I removed the defected module DBAN went on normally.
RAM, is there anything it can't do...
 
Hi Fyr :)

Thanks for posting back and letting others know what was wrong.

I am glad to hear everything is ok for you now.

The DBAN forum here is, shall we say, a little dead ! I did however notice that you managed to find and post on the new DBAN forum. Unfortunately that too seems a little abandoned.

Thanks.
 
the alternative, had you not found the source of the problem, would have been to try another version of DBAN (specifically the latest Beta version).

Glad the problem has been solved!
 
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