Mandrake 10.1 mouse
 

Okay, this is making me crazy; I'm a rank newbie trying to install Mandrake 10.1 on my vintage HP N5470 laptop and it's hanging during bootup. I use the "verbous" option and it doesn't seem to be able to handle USB. Sad because I've got USB mouse, pendrive, printer, etc. and really do want to use them.

Anybody had this problem? Its a HP Pavilio N5470, 1g AMD processor, 256 megs memory, cd/dvd drives, etc. Maybe Mandrake doesn't like my motherboard?

I unplugged both the mouse and pendrive and booted into 10.1 with no problem. It even recognized and activated my touchpad as the pointer device. So, I'm guessing the motherboard is not a factor here. I get the following lines on boot with my pendrive (or more importantly, my mouse):
"Initialinzing USB Control (ohci-hcd): [ok]
Mount USB Filesystem [ok]"

Then the system just freezes up.

As my earlier post indicated, I am a rank newbie... I stopped doing command lines many years ago, so please be specific if you know of a work-around.

How about without just the pendrive. Seems odd a mouse would be a problem, but the pendrive could certainly have some oddity in filesystem that linux doesnt expect or like.

Moved from *NIX to Mandrake

Thanks for the suggestion, Caeda, however, when I boot with ANY USB device, the thing freezes up. Pendrive, mouse, whatever. If I boot without anything in the USB ports, it boots clean and the touchpad becomes my only pointer device.

Is it possible that this thing is not picking up the USB module on boot?

Does Linux have a "print screen" command that one can envoke on boot, similar to the old DOS?

I've installed Knoppix since the last post with the same results, so I'm beginning to think that this is connected with Debian and not just Mandrake or Knoppix.

As I said earlier, it's been years since I actually tried to do anything with an O.S.

Chuck D

Mandrake 10.1 is very good with USB 2.0. You say you have a "vintage" HP. Is it old enough that you have USB 1? Have you checked your BIOS settings in case there's something there which can be affecting things?

Something else you could try is to boot without USB devices and then plug in the pen drive. What should happen is that after a few seconds the drive will be detected and mounted. An icon will appear on screen. If this does'nt happen I would suspect a hardware incompatibility.

usb freezes
 

Hi,

I am having the same problem with my HP Pavilion dv1000. I know that I have usb 2.0, so I don't believe the issue is with having usb 1.0 or 2.0.

I have updated my bios to the newest version, but that did not fix the problem.

I have heard that turning off ACPI fixes the problem for some people, but I currently don't want to do that, because I have heard that turning off the ACPI on laptops causes bad battery life and can also cause damage. Is any of that ACPI stuff true?


Thanks

phil

You may want to try booting the 10.1 CD with the alternative 2.4 kernels, which are less prone to hanging on some machines.

This will also provide a 2.4 installation to your hard drive.


e.g. flip to text mode then launch the installation kernel with

ati1

HI,

I tried the alt1 install and that did not fix the problem either.


I have also tried the following:

1. tried doing a full reinstall of 10.1 with alt1 did not fix anything, system still hangs during bootup
2. reinstalled mandrake 10.0 Official
That worked fine with all my hardware & usb devices
3. tried the upgrade install of 10.1 by doing an upgrade from my 10.0 to 10.1
have the following problem, similar to the original problem with 10.1 full install
a. usb mouse plugged in
gets to initializing usb controller (ehci-hcd) and hangs
b. unplug usb devices, gets to
entering run level 5
switching to run level 1
sending processes the term signal..
and hangs


So, seems that 10.0 works, but 10.1 does not work.


Can anyone offer suggestions on what I can do to get 10.1 to install or to do more trouble shooting?


system:
hp pavilion dv1049
512 megs ram
100 gb momentus 5400.2

Your may want to try then booting into "safe" mode and removing the USB drivers references in the /etc/mod*.*

Then turning OFF the USB services, and rebooting.

At this point your system should come up but still no mouse.

Flip to the console, kill the DM and run mousedrake.

See if you get a working mouse.

If not, modprobe the USB drivers one at a time.

One of them is probably causing the system to hang, but it may not be needed to utilize the mouse.

I ran into this situation with an older ZE5155 laptop.

Hi,

thanks for offering suggestions, but I'm still having problems.

I can't boot into safe mood with my installation of mandrake 10.1 official either.

If I reinstall 10.0 official again, I don't have any of these problems.

I then tried doing the upgrade to 10.1 official again with the same problems, so I also tried doing the full, new install of 10.1 official and again had the same problems.


I'm a newbee, and was hoping with 10.1 i could use the built-in support for my wireless card and some other features that are all built into 10.1

I went even further and tried doing the install of 10.1 with "alt1" and "alt0" to switch between the kernel's and still can not get 10.1 to boot after the install.

Is there something I could do during the install of 10.1 besides switching between the kernels, because I have already tried switching kernels?


thank you,

Phill

When you performed the ati1 installation which actual kernel was installed to the hard drive?

I had similar problems with 10.1 community and official. My own solution was to install 10.0 official and get back to work. Unless 10.1 has something in particular that you need that 10.0 is lacking, the path of least resistance and less trouble is to live with 10.0. Try another upgrade when 10.2 or higher comes out.