Hey,

my SuSE 10.2 stalls at boot, when loading the ndiswrapper. This also happens in failsafe etc.
The problem appeard after a kernel update. Anyways, to gain bakc acces to the system I want to keep it from loading the ndiswrapper module at bootup.

That's it... I think / hope to be able to help myself from there on...

I have access to the hd via live-CDs and a parallel Mandriva installation... It should be just the change of one config file, right? I just don't know which one...


Thanky, lads,

Linus (yes, this is my real name. Yes, still I'm a noob)

You probably just need to add the module 'ndiswrapper' to a blacklist which prevents it from being loaded. I'm not a SuSE user myself for a few good reasons and it could depend on the distribution which file you need to edit, but I'd try this: edit (probably as root) the file /etc/modprobe.conf.local (or equivalent) and add this line there:
save, reboot and see if it helps.

I tried that, but it doesn't work... The system still hangs with the message

usbcore: registered new driver usbfs
ndis wrapper version 1.25 loaded (preempt=no,smp=yes)
_ (blinking)

being the last thing to be displayed.

Definately, ndiswrapper is still loaded. It is not confirmed with a green "done" on the right, so I suppose this is where the system hangs... or is the loading of ndiswrapper not supposed to be confirmed and the stallng actually occurs in the step that follows? How would I find out which one that is?

However, I believe its the ndiswrapper....

How about just deleting the module?
Will the system give an error message, and continue to boot?

Thx

Look in /etc/modprobe.conf. If you find the line that starts the ndiswrapper module, add the comment hash to the beginning of the line.

the file does not even contain "ndiswrapper", "ndis", or "wlan" etc....

So still, ...

Next thing to try: look at/into the files in /etc/sysconfig/network. Do you find anything about ndiswrapper?

didn't work either, but here's my (probably totally unorthodox) solution:

I copied Kernel and modules from the mandriva partition to the suse partition and created an appropriate antry in my /boot/grub/menu.lst
So I was booting the mandriva kernel with my suse partition being mounted as the root file system. Careful: I did not overwrite anything! Kernel versions were different anyways... This worked at least good enough to get me going in runlevel 5 without graphical interface though, since nvidia driver modules were not yet installed for the mandriva kernel. Then I simply ran yast2 from shell and uninstalled the ndiswrapper RPM.

Now, using the original menu.lst entry, I can boot Suse as usual.

I am now going to compile ndiswrapper manually.
The system is up and running as I write, but we'll see how far I'll get from here.

Does anyone know whether this was "orthodox" or will I experience a lot of problems now?