Dell OptiPlex 745 reboot problem

Tony Molloy tony.molloy at ul.ie
Fri Sep 5 17:13:37 UTC 2008


On Friday 05 September 2008 16:05:04 Mike McCarty wrote:
> Tony Molloy wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I've just installed Fedora-9 on a lab of Dell OptiPlex 745 (SFF)
> > machines. ( only in 1 lab TG )
> >
> > After running firstboot when I went to reboot the machines they just hang
> > and I had to do a hard reboot. I thought this was a minor glitch and
> > ignored it.
> >
> > Now however when the machines boot into Fedora-9 the "reboot" and
> > "suspend" buttons do not work. The windowing system just shuts down and I
> > get a text prompt and the machines just hang there.
>
> Hang? That's a vague term. If you type on the keyboard, do characters
> get echoed? If you have a text prompt, then can you not do a
>

Hang means exactly what it means. The machines just go dead!!! No input from 
the keyboard accepted. Only thing to do is a hard reboot.

> # shutdown -r now

>
> Or even just
>
> # mount
>
> get a list of mounted file systems, and umount them all, except
> for /, which you'll have to
>
> # mount -o remount,ro /
>
> to get them all static, then hit the power button.
>
> Even if you are dead in the water, you should still be able
> to hit the power button without corrupting the alternate
> OS.

THat's OK for me but I don't want hundreds of students hitting the power 
button ;-)


>
> > As thes are dual boot machines this will cause a lot of problems starting
> > monday when the students return ;-(
>
> I don't understand why their being dual boot will cause a lot
> of problems. You just installed FC9, so that wasn't there before,
> and the problem shows up with FC9 booted. Presumably the alternate
> boot is some version of Windows. Does the problem also manifest
> itself when Windows (or whatever) is running?

No we re-install the software every year, This is a University environment, So 
Windows was re-installed last week and then I installed Fedora-9 replacing 
Fedora-7.

Because they will regulary get rebooted. If they were linux only it wouldn't 
be a big a problem.


Tony
>
> > Is ther some magic incantation to grub to sort this problem or any body
> > got any ideas.
>
> Ok, live and learn. The first idea is, before you make changes
> to machines with an important setup, make a backup. In this case,
> if you had a disc image, you could probably recover very easily.
> Next time, you'll know that.
>
> I'm still a little uncertain why you have a real problem. You
> have a machine which misbehaves when FC9 is running. Is it the
> fact that you can't shut down that is problematic?
>
> Mike
> --
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