The Friday 2004-05-14 at 20:29 +0100, Vince Littler wrote:

Thanks Tim for your reply. In my case, I boot with splash=verbose and after leaving GRUB, _nothing_ is displayed for almost exactly 2 minutes after the messages indicating what GRUB did. The HD is also silent for the duration. After the 2 minutes, there is a brief rapid disk action, and then the console displays boot messages, including the SCSI drivers activating. Reiserfs activity comes after this - it is not part of my delay.

It must be waiting for something. Did you look at the console 10 at that moment? -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson

The Saturday 2004-05-15 at 20:28 +0100, Vince Littler wrote:

...

It must be waiting for something. Did you look at the console 10 at that moment?

[Sorry Carlos, sent this to you 1st time and not to the list. More sleep would be good!]

No problem - Then I'll repost my direct answer here as well :-)

Yes, I agree, it seems to be waiting for something. But what?

2 minutes = 4 * 30 seconds in old money. Probing master and secondary on 2 IDE channels? [I'm totally SCSI.] Or something else.

What is so perplexing is that there are no consoles running at that point. I have the GRUB load messages on screen. If I boot failsafe, these remain for the 2 minutes, but they blank if I boot the Linux option of GRUB. I only get console 1 appearing after the 2 minutes, at which point the boot messages look roughly similar to those with 9.0 and the stock kernel.

I have no idea... I wonder if there is a "verbose" option. Report this to feedback - perhaps with a hwinfo log and the boot.msg file. Only a kernel developer can have a good educated guess at what is happening.

Fortunately, I still have my 9.0 installation running on the machine, but I will try another boot of 9.1, and see if console 10 gives any more clues. There are some minor complaints in the boot log about DSDT and interrupt routing and Linux doing an impression of Marvin the Paranoid Android along the lines of "if your BIOS won't do PCI, then I suppose I'll have to", but it is pretty much the same in 9.0. Nothing stands out, otherwise.

Try acpi and/or apic options, enabling and disabling. Who knows :-?

I could live with it, I suppose, but I think it is worth getting to the bottom of this, because any newbie and many oldies would give up looking at a blank screen after about 20s and say "it's broken". FWIW, the behaviour is the same for a DVD boot. [Not tried the CD.] It is only many years of OS/2 installs which has taught me to sit still and give it a chance, particularly at install time. Good thing is now that even with 4 machines, and a release every 6 months, I am getting out of practice at installing!

The same as I live with my machine been unable to power off at the end of the "halt" sequence. I can live with it, but it is a nuisance. At least, I can use the power button, but you can do nothing but wait. -- Saludos Carlos Robinson

On Saturday 15 May 2004 4:03 pm, peter Nikolic wrote:

On Thursday 13 May 2004 20:11, Vince Littler wrote:

...

Can anyone throw any light on this?

9.0 boots normally, with 2.4.21-215-athlon. However 9.1, newly installed to a spare partition, loads via GRUB and hangs for exactly 2 minutes as far as I can tell, before proceeding to boot quite normally. This hang also affects the DVD boot process, I believe.

If I use the default Linux entry in GRUB, installed by 9.1, the screen goes blank, for the 2 minutes before the spalsh screen is loaded. On failsafe boot, it halts with the following showing on screen:

kernel (hd0,4)/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb7 ide=nodma apm=off acpi-off vga=normal no resume nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 3 [Linux-bzImage, setup=0x1400, size-0x16538f] initrd (hd0,4)/initrd [Linux-initrd@0xdeb0000, 0x13f1d8 bytes]

Google does not offer much useful.

Hardware is TYAN s2460, with single athlon 1500MP and 512MByte, Matrox G450DH and Adaptec 29160 adapter

Ideas?

Thanks

Vince Littler

This sounds like boot sequence to me have you checked your bios settings since the install of 9.1

Not had chance to try 9.1 yet next week maybe now .

Pete

You are in the right sort of area. I have poked at all kinds of settings in the BIOS. Makes no difference. 9.0 continues to boot normally, 9.1 obstinates for 2 minutes. If I had some sort of clue, I would poke at the BIOS intelligently...

On Saturday 15 May 2004 9:26 pm, pinto wrote:

On Saturday 15 May 2004 18:53, Vince Littler wrote:

...

had some sort of clue

~ some sort of hardware probe? . . . if you use Installation CD to "boot installed system", does that boot faster?

[ if i have my usb modem plugged in, then my boot takes for ever ]

--

best wishes

____________

sent on Linux

____________

Thanks for the response. Felt inspired as a result of your suggestion to try booting 9.1 from LILO. No difference, still 2 minutes with a blank screen, before the boot proper starts. On trying with the DVD, I discovered that the DVD acually takes 4 minutes, sitting at the multilingual 'Welcome' screen, before starting. First, I chose to boot from the hard drive, using the GRUB on the DVD. This took me straight to the GRUB on my HD, which gave a blanks screen as already described for 2 minutes as already described. Next, I tried going into the Install and taking the install option to boot installed system. This too sat with a blank screen for approx 4 minutes. Carlos suggested to me reporting to feedback and this is what I shall do now.