Kubuntu needs Windows to Boot ???

[GkS]

Hi everyone!
I'm having a strange problem with my Kubuntu 6.06 installation. As you've figured by now I have a dual Boot with Windows Xp & Kubuntu.
The problem is that when i power on my pc the Kubuntu will not boot, it hangs at the point where it loads the Hardware Drivers,
But!
if I boot to windows firstly and then reboot without powering off my pc the kubuntu boots and loads perfectly.
Isn't that strange or what? Any ideas, someone? I need to get rid of this annoying thing.
Thank you.

[askrieger]

Re: Kubuntu needs Windows to Boot

I suspect a problem with boot order and Grub location. Is Grub located on the Master Boot Record of your primary hard drive, or is it somewhere else? Are you booting to Windoze by default in your menu.lst? If so, that combined with an extremely short option time(default is 3 seconds) and a hiddenmenu in menu.list might make it appear that you have no choice but an automatic boot to windoze. But then, I'd wonder how you get to boot to linux at all?

[GkS]

Re: Kubuntu needs Windows to Boot

No, that can't be, Grub is not the problem.
Somebody told me to try using the "irq=nobios" option when booting, and even if that didn't work I have reasons to believe that there's something like that that's going on.
Still searching...

[askrieger]

Re: Kubuntu needs Windows to Boot

I'm sorry, you're absolutely right. I missed the line in your message where you mentioned that it hung at the hardware detection stage. If your machine has a PCMCIA card bus, try adding the phrase "hw-detect/start_pcmcia=false to your /boot/grub/menu.list stanza at on the line that says something like

kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-25-amd64-k8 root=/dev/sda1 ro quiet splash

after the word "splash". Alternatively, if you don't have a pcmcia bus, try the words, "noacpi", "noapic", and "nolapic", one at a time. If your machine is fairly old, try the phrase "debian-installer/probe/usb=false", but that's a long shot.

[GkS]

Re: Kubuntu needs Windows to Boot

Well, my pc doesn't have a pcmcia card bus, it's not old (bought it 3 months ago) and I would really like to avoid turning off the acpi support, which also won't do any good because I tried it but it didn't work.

[askrieger]

Re: Kubuntu needs Windows to Boot

Can you look at /var/log/dmesg and see if there's anything suspicious?

Basically, I have absolutely no idea why your machine is failing hardware detection when it's started from scratch, but passes when it's started from windoze, so I'm suggesting that you eliminate various steps in the hardware detection phase to see if anything makes it work. If you've got a better idea, try it and if it works, please let us know what it was.

[GkS]

Re: Kubuntu needs Windows to Boot

Well, I really don't know what's going on, I've looked at the dmesg but I don't think there's something wrong in there. I'm attaching the file now so you too can check it out.
Thank you for your help my friend, if i figure it out I'll surely post again the answer in here.

[askrieger]

Re: Kubuntu needs Windows to Boot

The only thing I can tell from your dmesg file is that you've got a very complex system; (PATA and SATA drives, USB, firewire, and bluetooth peripherals). Again going by the troubleshooting principle of keeping it simple., I would remove non-essentials (if possible) and then add things back in one by one until I found what made the system crash.