failure to boot

[James Wilkinson]

Gerhard H. W. May has been having problems booting his machine.

I suggested:
> Take a look at lines 209 to 216:
> 
> > echo -n $" audio"
> > 
> > # Everything else (duck and cover)
> > for module in $other ; do
> >     load_module $module
> > done
> > 
> > echo -n $" done"
> 
> "echo" displays things on screen. You can see the "audio" coming up, but
> not the "done". (They're using pretty massive indirection here, which
> is what's getting me confused).
> 
> So can you put something like
> echo "other is $other"
> at about line 209. And take a look at what else is being loaded.

He reported:
> Done that. It displays:
> 
> "other is snd-intel8x0m i8xx_tco hw_random uhci-hcd uhci-hcd 
> yenta_socket yenta_socket yenta_socket"

snd-intel8x0m: sound and/or modem
i8xx_tco: watchhdog: can reboot the machine if it hangs. You don't need
it.
hw_random: Hardware random number generator. You don't need it.
uhci-hcd uhci-hcd : USB
yenta_socket yenta_socket yenta_socket: PCMCIA, IIRC.

You might want to rewrite those lines:
load_module snd-intel8x0m
load_module uhci-hcd

etc.

Then you can enable them and disable them individually without changing
anything else.

I had suggested:

> Actually, you might try just commenting out lines 212 to 214: depending
> on exactly what is in $other, you'll probably lose some functionality,
> but you might get further.

and he replied:
> Done that (left the echo "other is $other" in). It gets past the "other 
> etc." line I wrote above, then prints
> [ok] done
> 
> Then flashes up some more messages which are too fast for me to see (is 
> there a way of slowing this down or scrolling through it afterwards?), 
> then goes into that graphical launcher with the image of a computer. It 
> hangs at the line
> 
> "Starting pcmcia:"
> 
> That made me somewhat suspicious and I took the D-Link DWL-660 wireless 
> card out of the pcmcia slot and repeated the procedure. However, same 
> result. By the way, I don't have the machine connected to the internet 
> while doing all that, I hope that is acceptable.

Yes, that's fine. For the moment, shall we disable PCMCIA?

There's a couple of ways of doing this.

One is simply to press "I" for an interactive startup when prompted, and
choose not to load PCMCIA services.

One is to go into /etc/modprobe.conf
and change the yenta-socket lines to
install yenta-socket /bin/true
(or add one of those lines if yenta-socket isn't mentioned).

Or we can get past the "Starting pcmcia" by deleting /etc/rc5.d/09pcmcia
(or the same file in rc3.d if you set X not to start automatically).

It would probably help if you could disable RHGB and the quiet mode.
You've been told how to do this from the grub command line: you can make
this permanent in /boot/grub/grub.conf.

Good luck!

James.

--
E-mail address: james | When I was young I wanted to be a fireman, but I
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | dropped that idea when they explained to me that
                      | firemen don't actually make fires.
                      |     -- Konqi the dragon, KDE's mascot