HDD and CPU frantic activity at startup

[francois]

Hi there,

I just installed Feisty on a brand new HP nx 7400. Everything went reasonably well (I had run Breezy, Dapper and Edgy on a Dell Inspiron without any problems), until the graphic login under KDE: then the hard drive runs frantically and the computer is unusable for 7 minutes. It then returns to a normal state. You can imagine how frustrating that is, not to mention the reduced battery and hard drive life.

Any idea of what is causing this, and what a possible solution might be?

Thanks.

[penguin.ch]

Re: HDD and CPU frantic activity at startup

Do /var/log/dmesg and/or /var/log/kdm.log provide any indication

[francois]

Re: HDD and CPU frantic activity at startup

Thanks UnicornRider. I'm not exactly sure what to look for in dsemeg, it all looks quite normal. The numbers in the left column go up to 24.336, which I assume are seconds.

The kdm.log reports lots of errors, such as:
xf86OpenSerial: Cannot open device /dev/input/wacom (several instances of this one)

Also:
Warning: Type "ONE_LEVEL" has 1 levels, but <RALT> has 2 symbols

And:
Could not init font path element /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc, removing from list! (3 of those)

Then:
X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized input device 169
Major opcode: 145
Minor opcode: 3
Resource id: 0x0
Failed to open device
(3 instances one after another)

These messages are repeated in sequence 7 times.

The last line is BOGUS LENGTH in write keyboard desc, expected 5104, got 5108.

I'm honestly not too sure what that means, but I'm certainly keen to learn ...

Thanks,

[penguin.ch]

Re: HDD and CPU frantic activity at startup

I'm not exactly sure what to look for

Me neither therefore, you may sent both files to me (by e-mail) for inspection ...

[penguin.ch]

Re: HDD and CPU frantic activity at startup

O.k., an update of sorts: log files received and "studied" ... my tentative conclusion:

- PCI in more or less complete disorder;
- Graphic chip not properly recognized;
- WLAN chip causing a little (?) havock.

Therefore, you may try any of the following (unless someone knows better than me):

- (Re-) Configure the X server to match up better with the internal graphic chip (i810);
- (Re-) Boot with pci=assign-busses and/or pci=routeirq as additional parameters set;
- Reconfigure the WLAN chip (ipw3945), i.e. switch off the "Radio Frequency Kill".

Remark: could, please, someone with a laptop at hand correct me and/or provide the necessary details (?).

--

Addenum: "Loogle" offers this installation protocol of sorts which may contain some (more) useful hints ...

[jankushka]

Re: HDD and CPU frantic activity at startup

i810...
the intel chip shouldn't cause troubles.
best option, i think, is:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

manually delete the wacom sections and references to them.
manually delete the line that loads the fonts in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc.
the warning message refers to the keyboard and you can disregard it.

ipw3945...
caused troubles on my laptop with edgy.
back then i had to manually install the latest microcode from the intel web site.
(the one shipped withe edgy would crash and reload every nano second making the system unuseable).
but that microcode is now standard in feisty and i'm not having troubles with it...
anyway, in my case, to switch off the radio frequency kill means to switch on the wireless.
and vice versa, of course.
there's a switch on the side of the laptop.
i did some manual cleaning of /etc/network/interfaces and got rid of wlan0 and ath0.
i'm left with eth0 (wired ethernet) and eth1 (wireless ethernet).

can't say much more.
hth

[francois]

Re: HDD and CPU frantic activity at startup

Thanks guys. Very much appreciated indeed. It looks a bit daunting, but I'll jump in and do my best.

Incidentally the franticness has abated somewhat when instead of letting KDE start a session in it's preferred way (default from the gui logon) I chose specifically to start a KDE session. It booted KDE OK and stopped the crazyness. It has not done it again since.

[francois]

Re: HDD and CPU frantic activity at startup

Just one quick question: I assume that the line "pci=assign-busses" must be added to the menu.lst file in /boot/grub, is this correct? If not, where should I add it?

Thanks,

[penguin.ch]

Re: HDD and CPU frantic activity at startup

I assume that the line "pci=assign-busses" must be added to the menu.lst

Yep - to the line starting with "kernel", to be even more precise

[francois]

Re: HDD and CPU frantic activity at startup

Thanks, that precision did help ...

I did all of the above, but wacom continues to appear as an error in the kdm log, although I deleted the corresponding parts in xorg.conf.

I also was able to reproduce the erratic behaviour, due seemingly to Openoffice.org ...

Anyway at least the beast can actually do some work now. Thanks for all the assistance.