New SuSE 8.0 installation on i386 hangs during boot

Hi all,

I have a problem, so I searched for a related topic and read several threads about boot problems (often with SuSE). None seemed directly related to my problem, so I'm posting. I guess this is a good place (SuSE is advertised for this forum although there is no SuSE section, but I figure there are plenty of SuSE users here) since it could well be SuSE specific--I'm not experienced enough to know.

I've installed SuSE 8.0 Pro on my system 3 times now. The first time I got the problem that, after the installation and configuration (KDE fired up and unfortunately I have no mouse control), upon booting a second time, I believe after the hardware scan and during configuration, the system hung during the specific point of "Restoring the previous sound setting". I decided I must have done something wrong and reinstalled a few days later. I messed up the configuration process by hurrying it in order to make a meeting with friends, so I decided at this point it would be easier to reinstall. Last night I stayed up late to do so (poor wifey) and got through the first install disc, rebooted, finished the rest of the install and configuration (this time I even took time to configure my installation packages).

So far so good, still no mouse control but I think that is easily resolved. I fooled around in KDE for a while and tried to fix my mouse problem, but I needed the info for the X86Config and hadn't yet configured my system for Internet access, so I rebooted into Winodws and got the info. Upon rebooting SuSE, guess what? I got the same hang as in the previous installation. This is on the first boot of the fully installed system after the installation boots.

Here is my system setup:

* MSI motherboard: SiS648 Max-L (MS-6585) for 478 pin, includes onboard sound and 6xUSB
* Intel P4 2.4 GHz CPU
* Primary IDE HD (/hda): 80 GB with Windows 2kPro on primary, NTFS data extended partition, Windows XP Pro on a further partition, and a small (1GB) FAT32
* Slave IDE HD (/hdb, jumpers set, shows correct in BIOS): 40 GB with 1GB swap, 11 GB root for SuSE (booting from floppy only)
* 1024 GB DDR-RAM
* MSI nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200, Phillips TFT monitor
* Primary IDE (CD): "generic" DVD/CD-R drive (used to install)
* Slave IDE (CD): Phillips CD-R/W
* Generic 3.5" floppy
* MS USB Intellimouse and MS natural (ergonomic) keyboard
* Three game accessories plugged into USB ports (joystick, rudder pedals, TrackIR)


Hopefully most of this is not relevant, but since this seems to be hardware related I want to be fairly thorough. I checked through the hardware info in Yast2's menu during setup, and everything seems to be correctly identified. (Can't be too sure about USB, but it seemed right.)

The error message is at the same point: this is before I get a prompt, and after the kernel starts some services/daemons and does a "hardware scan on boot". The last two entries are "Starting sound driver:nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;intel8x0 nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;done" and "Restoring the previous sound setting", with a blinking cursor. Here is what my screen looks like during the hang (50kB image). Obviously it's getting stuck in the corresponding routine for whatever reason. I tried rebooting and selecting linux safe settings, but apparently it doesn't get to the safe settings, because it hangs at the same point.

So is anybody familiar with this kind of problem? Any ideas what I can do? It doesn't make sense to me to do something with a rescue disk since this is a fresh installation. Reinstalling clearly won't fix the problem. Since the installed system is hanging on boot I guess I need to boot with some kind of Linux kernel (such as the linuxrc used for installation?) to fix the problem, though I have no idea how to do something along those lines.

Please assume that I don't know too much more than what I've written here. My main experience with Linux so far has been installing SuSE (I did it before on another system with 7.1 but didn't use it much) while reading the manual. So I know a few Linux basics but not much more.

Very much appreciate any help,
Mike

From the newbie forum, Demonbane quite helpfully wrote:

You have a sis648 board, and it looks like its trying to load the intel i8x0 sound module for some reason try booting into single user mode(add "single" to kernel parameter in the bootloader) and remove that script which sets up the sound, probably /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S01alsasound then find a driver for the sound chip you have onboard and compile it manually, google is your friend

First of all, thanks to trickykid for the advice on posting behavior. Apparently I shouldn't post questions of this nature in the Distributions forum, but too late now.

Demonbane, your hint is surely right on the money (except that it's the S10alsasound file). I did do a google.com/linux search and came up with advice that the 648 chipset can use i810 drivers because of AC'97, but more specifically a page on Linux sound architecture that is not only relevant to my problem but also has a link to a kernel compiling HOW-TO. Apparently this is common practice even for non-advanced users and something I am going to have to learn to do, which is fine, but it sounds intimidating. Recompiling the heart of your OS... but I know I'm a Linux newcomer.

Speaking of being a newbie, I wasn't able to follow your advice. Thanks for the hint on loading with the single option, I did so and found I had to/should unplug the USB accessories when doing so. But I was able to get in as root and proceeded to the location you indicated. I couldn't cp, mv or rm the file. The permissions were as follows: lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12Oct 22 23:42 S10alsasound ../alsasound . chmod I know, but I honestly don't know what the l means. In any case all I could do was view the file in read-only mode. I see the code that generates the "Restoring the previous sound setting" message, lot of good that does me. Since I don't know how to remove/rename this script file, I don't know how to further follow your advice.

I suppose that's what I get for trying to install an older version of an OS on newer hardware. I probably ought to go ahead and download SuSE 9.0. I guess I just wanted to use a distribution I paid for!

Thanks for your help, I'll try and take it from here with that page and the HOW-TO. I'll be sure to report back...

Mike

When your kde freezes you my try to switch to any of the 7 consoles, for example press ctr-akt-f1 to switch to console1, if that works, log in as root and try to Kill X and restart it, also another way to kill it to press ctrl-alt-backspace, that will restart X. I'd rather switch to console #1 and kill X, the I would run either xf86cfg or xf86config (I would run xf86config, that runs in text mode)

Running those utility to configure X, you may configure, your mouse, card, keyboard and monitor. When configuring the mouse usually the mouse device is /dev/mouse, so you may want to answer that when xf86config answers you where is you mouse device.


Hope this helps

Regands
Lyx0m

lyx0m has a good explanation of how to fix your mouse problem. But on SuSE the program to configure X is called sax2.

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