Guys,

could you please help me with this problems. We have several computers running Fedora Core 1. All of them were working perfectly for some time (several months). Then last week two of them stopped booting. They start booting and then stop after message Enabling swap space. All the computers have the same fixed configuration running just plain Fedora with one custom application. After analyzing user's behaviour we think it may have something to do with use of USB key. Our users plug in USB key to transfer some data. The only commong behaviour we could identify was that if the users removed the key during shutdown or sometimes plugged it in during startup it rendered the computer unbootable.

We have tried everything, the computers don't have plugged in any peripheral, only keyboard and mouse (and we tried even without eyboard and mouse) but they will not boot anymore.

Can anybody advice me how to troubleshoot this? I would like to know if I can find out what is causing the problems or how can make the computers boot again to get to the data and make them usable again. Reinstall is not an option since as I said, the computers have fixed configuration and nothing but the data changes on them so nothing should be different from those working computers. Is there any explanation how can this happen? Any help would be really appreciated.

Miro

I'm having the same problem with a fresh install of Fedora Core 2. The system was working fine with Redhat (v7 I believe). From what I've been able to read in other places after the enableing swap space says okay then the system searches for hardware, running INIT scripts.

I have forced file system integrity check and the system still hangs during Enabling swap space? Even if I get interactive boot it still hangs before I can do anything. Any idea how to troubleshoot it?

Try booting into single user interactive... then shut-down cleanly and start-up again... I set up a fixed /etc/fstab entry for my usb-key to avoid hardware checking and fstab rewriting (makes for a faster boot-up as well).

I'm running Mandrake 10, and bootup sometimes, randomly, without warning, hangs upon "activating swapspace".
I press reset, and it comes up fine.

I'm betting on sunspots.

Just a shot in the dark here.... Maybe the USB key is causing the device numbers to change? Like what used to be dev/hdc3 and was the swap space is now dev/hdc4 to the machine. But the mount line in fstab still says dev/hdc3, so initializing the swap space hangs.

usb devices are generally sda not hdc

Shot in the dark #2 then... the hard drive wouldn't happen to be SCSI, would it?

I did the single user interactive and it worked perfectly for me. Thanks for the tip!!

Travis

another stuff is that it's possible to be the next thing not exactly swap related it happened to be with usb printer .. it was almost a saga till I fixed it and interactive was not applicable it still hung, but running kudzu kind of fixxed stuff

It is not because of swap space. The reason is one or more service starting-up problems during boot-up. You should go to services and select "no automatic start" for some services during boot. I suggest you start selecting "no start" for kudzu and any other network query services. Just to be sure select no-automatic start for all services and start them manually. You may also see the log's for the best candicates.

but with kudzu it was very strange with this printer.. I really spend much time initially if the printer was plugged it crashed and the "swap" thing, why is it so hard to use kudzu I mean I do not enable it for automatic but as the printer was detected for another usb hub and as I switched it it really messed up.. I had to reboot many times till it deleted previous configuration for the printer and so on.. maybe because of some timeout(meaning times of reboot till it confirms the absense of piece of HW)

In general my question is is it possible to better handle usb stuff? like usb-sticks and printers..

Hi, i have the same issue with the last version of mandriva 2005 le.

it hang after activating the swap partition.
tried booting with the single option boot it still hang.

i'm a very newbie in linux so any help is appreciated...
thanks