Clayton schrieb:
The SUSE installer worked OK, but when the comptuer did it's initial reboot during the install, we only got a black screen immediately after the normal Grub menu. Unplugged the data cables from the SATA drives and tried again. This time it worked, and SUSE was able to boot and finish installing.
Try the kernel parameter edd=off and report back.
Tried it... went from 100% failure to intermittent failure on boot.
Then your problem is clear. You have a BIOS bug. I hacked on the edd stuff a while ago and if disabling it makes your machine boot, the only thing that can help you is a BIOS update (in your case mainboard and sata controller BIOS). Explanation: The EDD code calls into the BIOS before the kernel enters protected mode, so if that call hangs, your machine will not boot.
Disabled SATA, and that seems to clear up the rest of the boot problem... for Linux. Now of course with SATA disabled, we can't boot back to Windows without an extra step in the BIOS to re-enable SATA. Funny since all the other machines I installed SUSE on with SATA work fine. Granted this is an old motherboard with an early SATA controller...
Hm, is your computer by any chance manufactured by Fujitsu-Siemens? Did I understand correctly that you can boot into Linux with SATA enabled and edd=off? If not, can you find a pattern when Linux with SATA works, like only the first time after switching on the machine, or only if no CD/DVD was in any drive or something like that? Regards, Carl-Daniel -- http://www.hailfinger.org/