Freeze on startup (semi-solved)

[jimmyjazz951]

I have searched the forum but I haven't seen this from anyone else. I did a clean install of 8.10 after a week of trying to get the nvidia drivers to work after upgrading from HH on all hallow's eve. Everything has been working fine except that on startup, after the grub menu, just as the blue bar starts to bounce back and forth it stops and does nothing no matter how long I wait untill I press and hold a key for a few seconds it starts up just fine. Not a major problem but an annoyance none the less. Any Ideas?

[toad]

Re: Freeze on startup

Thanks for searching the forum first

First we need to see what is happening on screen. To do so, we need to get rid of the blue bar.

1. Boot up.
2. Go into grub's command line
3. Edit your kernel line and remove the words "quiet splash" at the end
4. boot

What does it spit out?

[jimmyjazz951]

Re: Freeze on startup

Well it spits out a lot. Here is the last line that comes up each time it freezes:

[ 3.077518] hub 2-0:1.0: 7 ports detected
{space}
[ 133.268937] hub 3-0:1.0: 2 ports detected
As I copied down that last line it continued w/o a keystroke to:
[ 173.686353] ehci_hed 000:00:04.1: irq 22, io mem 0xf6289400
{space}
[ 283.283758] hub 4-0:1.0 2 ports detected
{space}
[ 313.110852] ata 4: SATA max UDMA/133 a abar m8192@0xf6484000 port 0xf6484208 irq 2301
{space}
nothing
{enter}
[ 386.497253] ssb: Sonics Silicon Backplane found on PCI device 000:30:000
{enter}
[ 459.056819] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
{enter}
{enter}
[ 508.352947] ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
{enter}
[ 555.183880] ata3 SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
{enter}
{enter}
[ 597.093943] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSIdisk
{enter}
[ 643.392069] Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision 3.20
{enter}
Begin: Running/scripts/init-bottom...

Done
{enter}
* Setting preliminary key map... {cursor}
{enter}

...and we're off to the races!

Like I said before, under a normal boot up, if I hold the space key while the blue bar bounces back and forth a few times everything comes up fine. So if you have a solution great. If not... oh well.

Thanks in advance.

Jimmy

[barbolani]

Re: Freeze on startup

You have not disabled the blue bar completely. Instead of deleting "quiet splash", could you try removing "quiet" and replacing "splash" with "nosplash"? If I do that in my system the blue bar does not appear at all.

Sounds like some service is waiting for you to press a key before continuing. But to know which one you need to get rid of the blue bar completely

[jimmyjazz951]

Re: Freeze on startup

Removing "quiet splash" did remove the bar. Thats how I got all of that text I typed in.

[toad]

Re: Freeze on startup

Here is the last line that comes up each time it freezes:

Each time it freezes? I thought a freeze is permanent, i.e. you can have only one!

Must be some misunderstanding, I'm sure.

Anyway - if its very last action in life is

* Setting preliminary key map...

we have some strange things going on 'cos that really is no good reason to freeze! Let me do some googling...

[jimmyjazz951]

Re: Freeze on startup

Well if freeze isn't the correct word, lets just say it stops and then does nothing until I press a key.

Thanks once again.

[toad]

Re: Freeze on startup

What are your specs? Could be that your computer lacks RAM/CPU power 'cos I've never heard of anything like this ever before in years and years of computing

[jimmyjazz951]

Re: Freeze on startup

AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual-core 1.8 GHz w/1GB of RAM and a nvidia GeForce 7150 Graphics card. It ran Kubuntu 8.04 without a problem and 8.10 just fine with this one exception as well as the Vista it came with with out a problem. (Although, I must say that, now that I use Kubuntu almost exclusively Vista feels sooo slow ).

Maybe I could try to reinstall but I don't think it is worth the trouble for such a minor inconvience.

Thanks for your interest in my problem. There is so much willing help here that I have always found the answers to every other issue I've had in a previous post.

[jimmyjazz951]

Re: Freeze on startup

I had an idea. I rebooted and waited a few minuets before a keystroke then pulled the kernel log to see exactly where the thing stopped. Here are the last few lines before the pause.

2008-11-15 10:32:57 forcedeth Reverse Engineered nForce ethernet driver. Version 0.61.
2008-11-15 10:32:57 ACPI PCI Interrupt Link [LMAC] enabled at IRQ 20
2008-11-15 10:32:57 forcedeth 0000 0:0a.0: PCI INT A -> Link[LMAC] -> GSI 20 (level, low) -> IRQ 20
2008-11-15 10:32:57 forcedeth 0000 0:0a.0: setting latency timer to 64

I will try a few more times to see if it is consistent or, not.

[jimmyjazz951]

Re: Freeze on startup

Yep, it is consistently at the same spot.

[dibl]

Re: Freeze on startup

Does dmesg provide any further information on where/how the processing hangs up?

[toad]

Re: Freeze on startup

Do you have a Gigabyte motherboard?

[jimmyjazz951]

Re: Freeze on startup

The motherboard is a Quanta in an HP dv6609wm. I'll get back with the dmesg. I'm on Vista right now.

[toad]

Re: Freeze on startup

Well, that's my theory of PCI latency out of the window then...