Hang at boot: Compaq Presario 800

[David Muse]

On Wed, 17 Dec 2003 12:49:05 -0800 (PST)
Bob Dedrick <bd914 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I'm having problems booting the Core 1 system I've
> installed on a Compaq Presario 800 notebook.  At boot
> time, the last few messages prior to the system
> hanging are:
> 
> Creating block devices
> Creating root device
> Mounting root filesystem
> kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
> EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode
> Freeing unused kernel memory: 136k freed
> 
> The power switch is the only thing the system listens
> to at this point.
> 
> I'm also unable to boot from the installation CD-ROM,
> which hangs after the message "hda: attached ide-disk
> driver."  However, I was able to boot from floppy, and
> install from CD, with no problems.
> 
> Debugging is complicated by the fact that "linux
> rescue" after booting from floppy doesn't seem to work
> (I end up in the install program regardless).
> 
> I have a bit of Linux experience, but right now I'm
> stuck.  Any suggestions on debugging this?

I have the exact same notebook.

Use the following bootstring:

	linux apm=off nofirewire

You may run into difficulty with the cardbus (pcmcia slot)
later though.  Apparantly, the 2.4 kernels do something
differently than the 2.2 kernels and the cardbus never
gets initialized.  When I bought my laptop, I was running
redhat 6.2 and everything worked fine.  When I upgraded
to 7.0, the cardbus stopped working.  I tried everything
and the only thing that I can get to work is to keep a
stripped down redhat 6.2 installation in a small partition
on the hard drive, boot to it when I power-on the laptop,
then reboot (without powering down the laptop) into
fedora.  Apparantly, the 2.2 kernel initializes the cardbus
and it retains it's initialized state across the reboot as
long as the laptop isn't powered off.

If anyone else out there has this laptop and has a different
solution for making the cardbus work, I'd love to hear about
it.

Dave Muse
david.muse at firstworks.com

> 
> 
> =====
> -- 
> Bob Dedrick (bd914 at yahoo.com)
> Hartsdale, NY
> 
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