RH8-strange boot-up problem
 

The RH8 installation went well, but on re-booting the system,
the boot up text displayed OK until the area where you
expect the green OKs appear. at this stage the screen
was filled with garbage characters (with green garbage
in the normal 'OK' positions).
The screen scrolled thru all this and then went off to a
normal gui logon screen, and everything else seemed OK.

So, being slack, I would normally ignore this and play, er
work on, however there are a couple of red entries in
amongst the green ones which I would like to know about
and if possible fix.

Anyone seen this before?

Sytem info:
AMD6/2 500 MHz, 40 Gig HDD, triple boot: 98SE, RH8 & MDK9
no probs with other os.
I'm at a loss as to where to even start looking.
Thanks for any pointers.

Forgot to mention, did a complete re-install with the same
result.

What are these red entries?

Hi,
Under RH7.3 the red entries indicated an error loading
something.

the word 'failed' appeared in red alongside the entry.
normally a green OK is shown.

The red's could be errors mounting file systems or initializing your sound card etc.

Did the garbage characters appear when you first installed? Or did they happen out of nowhere...?

#Garry :D

p.s. Welcome to LQ and the world of Linux!

Thanks Garry,
The errors appeared on the first re-boot of the system
after installation, and each time since.
I have rebooted the system a few times now trying to
catch the error. It occurs about six lines after the
"Welcome to Redhat, press I to enter interactive mode"
message. comparing a Mandrake startup, it seems to
be at the time the keymap is loaded (if MDK
and RH have the same startup sequence) this would make
some sort of sense, although I use the same keyboard settings in MDK.
Getting into interactive mode works, but not until the
language change occurs so I can't read what's going on.
The problem seems to have a consistancy in that blank
characters are replaced by a combination of 'G' with
a '^' on top, OK becomes 'zu' with an accent above the
'z' and a tiny circle above the 'u'.
In X everything works fine, keyboard translation is
correct. but on closing the system down, the same garbage
appears.
I'm going to do a re-install and play with keyboard/
language settings, I'll report progress.

Yes i was going to say, it could be a lagnauge setting of some sort...

Did you install any other languages besdies enlgish installed?

because maybe that is set to default for startup or something?

Sorry if i'm not much help :p

#Garry :D

The other language I installed was 'AU English' as well
as the default US English. I'll try it again, without the
OZ. [and learn to spell colour as color :-)]
Thanks for your help

Hehe no worries...oh and this doesn't happen when you installed Mandrake right? Just redhat?

#Garry :D

yep just redhat8 and no probs with MDK or redhat 7.3
previously installed on the same system.
I'm off now to hone my installation skills :)
thanks and cyalater.

Ok, if you have more problems post up here and i will try help you as much as i can...

#Garry :D

-Update-
Completely re-installed a no-frills desktop.
US English, no extras.
same result.
I'll get the updates, when the ltmodem code is
available in a few days, and try again.

Did you check your boot messages?:
dmesg | less
Makes reading the log a bit easier:)
lynch
ps. Hey,GT glad to see you're still living;)

hahahah hey lynch, yeh can you believe i'm still scandisking my windows partition, it's getting there, my files are slowly recovering, i'm too lazy to find my thread and post an update, but i might later on...

#Garry :D

Hi,
Thanks I'll have a look next time I boot RH.
I did look at the logs and found one error in system
log (I think):
ohci1394: pci_module_init failed
(haven't a clue as to what this means, could be
to do with my winmodem)

also found the following in the boot log:
keytable: ^[[60G
and
keytable system font: ^[%G

Do these make sense?