Hi there,

Here is even more strange stuff to think about.

I messed up my whole installation. Unfortunately I lost my Grub installation and did not know what to do anymore, even being unable to boot into windows. So I had to install the whole thing again, without Windows, so you will find me some more frequently on this forum

I tried to install a copy of Mandrake, because I had some positive experience with it a couple of years ago, the 8.1 version. But after installing, first boot...black screen with some lost coloured pixels...trouble with my nVidia "old" TNT2 (already a known bug). So back to Fedora again.

What happened this time:
I left the harddisk in the normal IDE controller, installed FC5 and everything went fine. Then I updated all the stuff that was avaiable, including the latstes kernel 2174. Guess what No boot. So I plugged the cable into the Raid controller and.......BINGO I was able to boot.

Hope that I gave you enough info to figure things out. Don't rely on me...I'm only glad if I can be of any help.

I have a similar problem with "Red Hat nash version 5.0.32 starting" on FC5.
My system hangs but only for a minute or two. The IDE LED on the front case never turns off after this happens (never). First I had a single IDE drive. I found that by disabling SATA drives completely solved the problem. Did not matter because I had none.
Then I installed a SATA drive and enabled them and the problem returned.
The problem only shows up after upgrading kernel, 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 to 2.6.17-1.2157 ( in my case ) the newer kernel does the same thing.

At least I do eventually boot.

I have tried various bios settings without success, AHCI - Emulated PATA -On Board Sata boot rom enabled and disabled.

ASUS A8R-MVP, Athlon64 3800+, ULI Sata. No raid dirves installed

As of a few days ago (maybe even just yesterday) there is a new version of the kernel available (2.6.17-1.2174_FC5) but I've found that this does not improve my situation at all. I experience the same issue with the latest kernel as I did after first upgrading to 2.6.17. I tried just leaving the system alone for a few minutes to see if it would eventually continue to boot, but after 4+ minutes of inactivity I decided it wasn't going anywhere and just rebooted into the original kernel again.

I've tried disabling the quiet option when booting into 2.6.15 to see if I can get a better idea of exactly what step is supposed to happen after the last message I see, but the screen gets flooded with SELinux messages and by the time they've slowed down the messages I need have been pushed way off-screen. I guess my next step will be to try temporarily disabling SELinux in an effort to remove those messages from the console so that the messages I'm looking for don't get pushed off the top.

Edit: I've been reading Red Hat's bugzilla and think I may have found a fix. I'll test it once I get home and post back with my results.

Even stranger: I destroyed my computer for some unknown reason, so I had to start a complete new install. I left my HD to the IDE (not raid) controller. When I upgraded the kernel, once again I wasn't able to get it booting. The solution (workaround?) was a move of the HD, this time from the IDE to the raid controller.

So far, so good.

I'm now up and running with 2.6.17-1.2174_FC5. Here is the fix that I found in Bugzilla, just be aware that it does involve installing some non-release packages from the development repository:

This will update mkinitrd to the latest development build (currently 5.1.8-1). It will also update a couple of lib packages as dependancies.

Once the updated packages are installed, you need to back up your current kernel image file and then create a new one with the newly installed mkinitrd.

Be aware that these commands are specific to the kernel version that you have installed so if you are not using 2.6.17-1.2174_FC5 you will need to modify them slightly to reflect your kernel build.

After that, you should be good to go. Reboot the system and choose the 2.6.17 kernel from your bootloader.

Credit for this fix goes to Chris Adams who originally posted it and Andreas O. whose steps I modified slightly to get the code listed above. The only difference is that he temporarily enabled the development repository by editing the repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d as opposed to using a command line switch.

With regard to your comment about waiting a few minutes for the boot
to continue... you might try waiting longer. I thought my reboot
was hung after upgrading to the latest FC5 kernel. On a whim I just left
it for awhile, and came back after 10-15 minutes to a booted system.
Subsequent boots didn't take so long, so I don't know what might have been
happening when it seemingly hung.

Thanks for the tip, Rob, although since my system is already running under the new kernel, it doesn't really apply to me.

Still, it is something for others who have not yet updated mkinitrd or who feel uncomfortable installing non-release packages on their systems.

This is my case.
I use FC 5 on 3 IDE drives. 2 drives make a RAID 0 array (strip) and the /boot partition is on one of this drives.
The 3rd drive is used as a storage.
The controller is external RAID 0/1 controller with mark SUNIX with Silicon Image chipset.

FC 5 works just fine. I updated the kernel and now have 2.6.17 with nvidia GeForce 2 MX 400 video card. My RAID array is not made by the controller. It is a MD raid array on 2 of the partitions of this drives.

I say again, FC 5 works fine. Just wanted to say my successful case.

Ok, I found out exactly where my 2 minute boot delay was happening. I booted with quiet mode off and I found the answer. I have 4 - sata ports with a 36GB WD Raptor connected to sata1. When the kernel starts probing the sata ports it probes all four, only 1 responds the other 3 take forever to timeout, see the qc timeout message below.

ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xFFFFC20000004900 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 193
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xFFFFC20000004980 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 193
ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xFFFFC20000004A00 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 193
ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xFFFFC20000004A80 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 193
ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113)
ata1: dev 0 cfg 49:2f00 82:346b 83:7f21 84:4003 85:3469 86:3c01 87:4003 88:007f
ata1: dev 0 ATA-6, max UDMA/133, 72303840 sectors: LBA48
ata1(0): applying bridge limits
ata1: dev 0 configured for UDMA/100
scsi0 : ahci
ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0)
ata2: qc timeout (cmd 0xec)
ata2: dev 0 failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error)
scsi1 : ahci
ata3: SATA link down (SStatus 0)
ata3: qc timeout (cmd 0xec)
ata3: dev 0 failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error)
scsi2 : ahci
ata4: SATA link down (SStatus 0)
ata4: qc timeout (cmd 0xec)
ata4: dev 0 failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error)
scsi3 : ahci
Vendor: ATA Model: WDC WD360GD-00FN Rev: 35.0
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05

I don't understand why it calls sata1 scsi3

Hope this helps

I finished my upgrade of FC5 yesterday. It installed without a hitch. Upon boot it froze at Start Service Local. I rebooted several times and can not get passed this. I eventually entered interactive mode and said No to every service. Right after that it freezes. Probably video related. I left it in that frozen state all night... still hung. I can not switch to other TTY1-6 either. Interestingly enough... sshd service starts, so I am able to ssh into my box from my windows PC and do everything from ls - yum update. I tried to look for a process that i could kill, but really don't know what i am doing.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have mythtv, and the mythbackend is running, and i really would like to get back in business!!!