Fedora boot-mysterium

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Evening dudes/dudettes

 

After a good experience with FC3 last week on an old P3-box with ASUS P3B-F board, I had our boys from the tech dept. install FC3 as tryout on newer hardware.

 

The problem

The installation on the new machines went superlative, everything was partitioned and detected nicely, but ... on the first boot Fedora hangs on always the same spot:

 

It activates the swap partition ok, then stands for about 2 mins, displaying the boot-messages, then the screen goes grey, the mouse pointer stays and nothing else happens.

 

The pointer is sorta blue-ish, so this might indicate background activity, dunno? We even let the machine stand still for 15 mins, but FC3 just keeps displaying a grey screen and a mouse pointer. On the harddisks or the DVD-drives there seems to be no activity, also the LEDs on the NICs show no networking activity whatsoever.

 

Interestingly enough this is definitely not some sort of kernel panic. When you press the power-button, the boot-console appears again and notifies you that the system is going down now.

 

The installation that I did last week still works nicely. Here some specs of the machine that works ...

 

Machine specs

FC3 working on that hardware:

P3/850MHz, ASUS P3B-F mobo, 768MB RAM, Gladiac 2MX gfx-card, 2x3Com-NICs, 2x60gig Seagate Barracuda IDE disks, 1xPLEXTOR IDE DVD

 

FC3 failing on this hardware:

Athlon XP3000+, ASUS A6V600-X VIA KT400-board, 1 gig GEIL PC3200 dual channel RAM, onboard LAN, 1 x 3Com 100MBit NIC, Geforce 4MX, 2xSAMSUNG 120gig IDE HDDs, 1xPlextor DVD.

 

I'd like to note that -out of curiosity- we installed a flock of distros on one of the newer machines. MDK10, Debian Woody, Yoper, Suse 9.2. All these distros booted the machines without the slightest problem (and "no", we don't have too much time, we just have apprentices for the tedious OS-install tasks

 

I'd also like to mention that on all machines the following onoard components have been disabled: USB controllers, serial ports, parallel port, sound, gameport, SATA controller and SATA RAID controller-bios.

 

Maybe someone can shed some bits of light on this? Unfortunately FC3 is still "young" so there is not much to find on the net.

 

Many thanx in advance

[matttah 0]

what happens when you hit ctrl alt f1 or f2 or f3 and so on? Does it go back to bash prompt?? perhaps your x system is installed with incorrect drivers.

Daum

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thanx for the reply, matttah

 

I'm not too sure about the particular keystrokes you are suggesting, but we did of course try to jump to different consoles - which did not work. In fact the systems weren't responsive at all, not even to a harsh CTRL-ALT-DEL combo

 

In the meantime, I have investigated the matter further and found something on some old Fedora forums that looks exactly like my prob ... "Enabling swap space [ OK ]" -> halt

 

From what I've read now it is related to the sendmail daemon blocking the system from finishing the boot sequence. I won't bash FC3 now before I've verified that, but if that is the cause then it is just as stupid as any BIOS that tells me "No Keyboard found ... press F1 to continue"

 

I will continue to peek into that matter and keep you people informed

 

cu

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'lo there

 

Got the prob fixed with FC3 hanging after enabling swap partition. FC3 has disqualified a bit due to this behavior, but in case someone else encounters the same probs, here's the thread that helped me to solved the issue here ...

 

Fedora Core boot probs revisited

 

cu

[danleff 0]

Nice find! I guess all the partitoning and enabling is not fixed yet. I assume that you use the Fedora partitioning utility for all the installs?