Hi guys

I've done a fresh install of fc13 on an old Thinkpad 600X. Was running fine, installed ndiswrapper to get a netgear wifi NIC running, which was great, then downloaded 250+ updates. That was this morning. And then had been running on and off all day today with light duties like browsing and playing streaming radio. All seemed good.

After restarting this afternoon though, it gets to the point where the horizontal animations reach the "Fedora 13" and that all goes white and dims...then that screen hangs. It stays with that white bar across the bottom and "Fedora 13" without launching into the X session with login.

On other screens I have functional text logins but I really would love some advice what to do with one of those in order to see what's broken and potentially fix it.

Any ideas? Thanks

Can you boot into the last functional kernel ok ?

Sorry I should have mentioned that. Both kernel options in grub result in the same symptom.

I suggest editing the kernel options from the grub menu, add 3 to the end of the line and hit return. This will boot into run level 3, where you can run startx. It would appear to be a graphics issue, but without seeing the error messages it's hard to tell. You might also hit the escape key while the Fedora graphic is showing, to see the detailed line by line progress through the boot stages. If you can get to login at all, then have a look at /var/log/dmesg to see what happened during the boot. Post it here (in code tags please) if you can get it to a functioning machine.

Hi smoker, your advice certainly has helped me learn a great deal more, not least what happens during boot, but also how to use smbclient...but I digress.

The only errors in the boot sequence are warnings about vmmouse which I understand everyone with fc13 currently gets, but they're not relevant since we're not running in a virtual machine.

/var/log/boot.log attached, as pasting in CODE tags made this post too long. Likewise /var/log/dmesg was too long to paste...so also attached.

Booting to run level 3 allowed me to run startx, but after a blank screen that flickers a couple of times it comes back without launching. The output of cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log has a few EE lines
The input driver EE's happen after failing adding a input device for the lid switch, IBM touchpad and Macintosh mouse respectively.

Complete Xorg.0.log attached.

Unfortunately updates to x11 that yum found were released today didn't contain the silver bullet either

Attached Files

	dmesg.log (119.6 KB, 18 views)
	boot.log (2.2 KB, 11 views)
	Xorg.0.log (31.9 KB, 20 views)

That dmesg log is full of errors.

But I would recommend removing ndiswrapper from the system. It appears to be causing issues with lots of other services.
My only source for that conclusion is this post, so it might not be the root of the issue, but it does look very similar (apart from the actual IRQ concerned). I would also try disabling SElinux until this is sorted. /etc/selinux/config set it to disabled.

I've only been sorting this machine out part-time, thus the delay between posts. Thanks very much for your suggestions smoker. I did remove ndiswrapper, but still the machine didn't boot to x. So I resorted to a clean re-install, which wasn't too painful an option since the problematic install was under a day old.

Now, with ndiswrapper installed and all patches reapplied the machine is rebooting and all is good, though now I have an annoying audio issue (no audio until you move the volume control, and then it might be just an annoying buzz until you move it again). This may indicate an issue with the underlying hardware was a contributor to the previous failed installation. For the moment the audio doesn't inhibit using the notebook for the reasons we were running it up, but will keep looking into that one when time permits.

Thanks - filing this one as resolved : )