After reading another fifty messages in the German SuSE mailing list someone mentioned a solution SuSE mailed to him:
boot with 'barrier=off', some IDE disks need it.
I tried it and ... my system boots again!!! Roel. On Sunday 25 July 2004 22:28, Roel Vestjens wrote:
On Tuesday 22 June 2004 I mentioned a problem with kernel-default-2.6.5-7.75. The system kept hanging during boot with the message: "ReiserFS: hda3: checking transaction log (hda3)" Reinstalling the original default kernel from dvd solved my booting problem.
After fixing the system I tried to find out what went wrong and if it's something to do with my system (MSI K8T Neo mainboard, AMD Athlon 64 3000, one s-ata disk and a p-ata disk with Suse 9.1 on the sata disk and WinXP on the pata disk) or the installation. A lot of people (not only with the 64 bit kernel version) had the same problem with this particular kernel update. Reading many messages I discovered that the latest patch of mkinitrd and the new kernel patch kernel-default-2.6.5-7.95 seemed to solve this problem.
So did I, but kept the same booting problem. Even after a complete clean install from DVD, followed with an update of just the mkinitrd patch and after a reboot updating the kernel to kernel-default-2.6.5-7.95. An update to the latest kernel from ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/kernel/kotd/x86_64 doesn't solve my problem either. Everything I tried, different booting parameters, skipping my second disk and usb in fstab, it didn't make any difference. The system still stops with the annoying line: "ReiserFS: hda3: checking transaction log (hda3)"
I expect it has really something to do with SuSE specific modifications of the kernel because a clean install of the 2.6.7 kernel (compilation from source) results in a working system.
Can anyone give me a clue what causes this problem?
Roel Vestjens