Summary: Video fault on boot when KDE starts, but only after being shut down properly and turned off. Rebooting yields a perfect boot, removing power while running yields a perfect boot.

I'm working on a very strange problem for a client and I think I've hit a brick wall. In a nutshell, when the system is booted up all indications are normal until the GUI starts. I briefly get an hourglass on a black background (it's normally blue) and then just a black screen with a corrupt line of randomness across the top of the screen. The weird part is that this ONLY happens after the system is shut down and turned off.

If I kill power after I get the corrupt desktop, it will boot into KDE just fine. Also, if I reboot instead of shutdown it will boot correctly.

For now, I've told them to boot up until it freezes/corrupts video and then perform an alt+SysRq+REISUB to reboot into a usable system. After that it works as expected, so they basically just have to start up and then reboot if they ever turn the equipment off.

The equipment rack has an identical redundant computer drawer as a ready spare, complete with a seperate hard disk and all. One hard drive came pre-loaded from the manufacturer and the other was loaded with the same software by the client from media provided by the manufacturer. I've swapped hard drives with no change and the client has reported swapping the entire computer with the ready spare with the same result.

The problem reportedly only surfaced a few weeks ago, but of course they can't think of anything that "happened" a few weeks ago. This is all new equipment less than a year old, but it may have been sitting in a warehouse for a few years before being installed.

I may be leaving something out, but I can't think of any more specifics except that the client also swapped monitors with no change.

I've never seen/heard of this happening before, but one of the clients told me that they saw the same thing happen on an identical piece of equipment at a different facility while visiting them.

Thanks in advance for any ideas,
==Dave

You're back to the BIOS, and I'd guess it's something with agp or pcie settings, probably interrupts or write speeds. "Auto" isn't good enough in this case.

The only difference between a cold boot and a 3 fingered salute is that the bios are reread, post is done in full, shadowed into upper memory, etc. I'd like you to reboot, wait until it has the disks unmounted, and then give the box a hard reset before it reboots. What does that do?

Get your m/b number and google for it on www.google.com/linux to see if it is specific to that board

Thanks BK, I'll try to get out there today and have a go. Unfortunately, the MB isn't listed in the documentation I have in the office so I'll have to drive out there to get that too.