Not sure, I was hoping somebody could tell me.........

I am a newbie too, but I was just helping you ask.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Looking at your start up logs there are 3 things I noticed - it was looking for devices hde and hdg both of which it couldn't find, it couldn't set up the networking (it failed on eth0) and it was also trying to load NFS which is a network filing system.

I once had an awful time with a system hanging (or appearing to) after I took out a SCSI drive - I had to put it back in temporarily in order to boot the machine and get rid of all the fstab stuff relating to it before removing it again. Therefore if you have had other drives in the machine which you've removed then that could be an issue.

If you don't need networking then you can disable the network card in YaST .. Network Devices .. Network Card and also turn off any NFS stuff (and anything else you don't need) using YaST .. System .. Runlevel editor. If you do need networking then you need to sort out the problem.

The other thing is that I had problems myself with SuSE 9.1 initially which needed the YaST Online Update to get fixes. If you don't have internet how are you keeping up to date with the bug fixes?

Hope this is some help.

I don't

I'm sorry to say that I didn't spend the time to look through the entire log. Of the things noticed by andrewdodsworth, I'd say the hde and hdg errors are most likely to be your problem.

You probably don't need NFS, but it doesn't seem to give any errors (this is one of those things that you don't need if you don't know what it is). It backgrounds quickly and doesn't complain about anything.

I know that you can get the F2 to work before the "eth0" problem (which gets backgrounded, probably after several seconds). So that probably isn't your hold up.

hde and hdg are names of hard disks here that your kernel cannot seem to communicate with. I would expect this to be faster, but it well could your problem. It looks like you're using IDE hard drives, and have nothing connected to your SATA controller. If this is so, then I would suggest trying to turn the SATA feature off in BIOS setup. Most machines have two hard drive cables and a total of four possible IDE drives. These are normally named hda, hdb, hdc and hdd. I suspect that hde and hdg are SATA designations (SCSI drives use sda, sdb,sdc, etc.).

I would like to emphasize that these errors come into play before the init scripts read the fstab file. This is not an fstab problem. (I believe andrewdodsworth when he says that it was his problem, but it is not your's). If this is the problem then it sounds more like the problem that J.W. mentioned above.

Also, that ACPI section looks a little long to me (though I could be mistaken). You could try turning off ACPI (related to plug and play). The file /boot/grub/menu.lst contains the boot menu. "if you experience problems, try using option 'pci=noacpi' or even 'acpi=off'." You could add one of these to the end of the appropriate "kernel" line in menu.lst to turn off this feature (don't put any quotes around them). (You might want to copy the section and alter the copy. Make sure to edit the title of your copy to give it a unique name.)

As for updates, the best solution would be to try to get your network card up and running. If you can't, then you may be able to find and apply the updates from one of the ftp servers (using another computer and CD-RW for example). Instead of looking in */suse/i386/9.1, try looking in */suse/i386/updates/9.1.

Ok, i had the same problem as this but couldent disable SATA as I use a SATA drive. in the append section (test by typing this in at the grub boot menu)

if this works add it to the boot loader in the append="hdg=noprobe hde=noprobe"

worked for me, hope this is of some help (possibly you are unable to disable onboard SATA, sounds stupid but possible like in my case)

Thanks, I'll try that and see what happens....

And the hdx=noprobe would not fix it, finally I figured out that I could use idex=nobrobe (x=0-5) this solved the problem for me. also you can tinker with idex=none and disabling plug and play in the bios.

OK, I'm sure I don't know as much as some of the other people in this thread, but in my system, the things that seem to take longest are scanning the PCI, scanning the USB and waiting for my IP address.

I always have the same things plugged into PCI (I don't tinker that much) and my router is set up to always give me the same IP address. I usually have the same USB things plugged in, too.

If there's a way of instructing it not to look for those things, but to just tell it what's there and expect blind faith on its part, I'm sure that would speed the boot process up by a fair bit, too.

Although having said that, I did notice a lot more errors in that bootlog than I see when I hit F2 (which I always end up doing, the boot process takes so long), so I'm sure that Linux being scientific in its boot methods isn't the only thing causing the slowdown.

The usb and pci scanning are done by the hotplug system in a process called cold plugging. I'm not sure how to go about telling it not to cold plug, but this should give you a direction.

SuSE uses dhcpcd for handling dhcp information (ip addresses and such). dhcpcd might have an option for this, but the easiest solution would be to set up your network connection statically from YaST (ip address, nameservers, route/gateway).

Oh, OK. Thanks, I'll do that.

Sorry, Randon, I seem to have usurped your thread slightly... how rude of me

But it should still help you if your box has a static IP assigned to it...

I got it!!
RAID was enabled in the BIOS and I'm not using it, Suse and winblows were both looking for that.
I disabled everything RAID in the BIOS and WAALAA!!
Boots in 30 seconds!!!!!!!!

Thanks for all your help guys!

And thanks for posting your final solution. Next time one of us runs into this problem we will have something else to check. Well done.

i know you guys are talking about 9.1 but i have a 9.2 question that is simular. I cant get to the logs of the boot though because i cant get the computer past the starting nfsboot (sm-notify). It wont even give the done message. My other question is where do i hit the f2 button. at the splash screen it just gives me language options.

how do i get rid of the whole nfs thing in the first place