Suse 9.1 & 9.2 pro freezing at welcome screen during boot
 

I was in 2 minds wether I should put this in the laptop board or here in the Suse board, but in the end I decided that my query might get better exposure in the Suse board as this is where the experts play..

I was bored and decided to test Suse on my HP Pavilion ze5354 notebook so I downloaded the live 9.2 DVD which needless to say impressed the hell out of me so I decided to go the whole way and install Suse on a more permanent basis.

I had previously received the resource kit from Novell which contained the 9.1 pro version on a DVD, however when I booted the disk it got as far as the isolinux loader blue welcome screen and halted,,
my keyboard leds werent flashing which I would normally associate with a kernel panic, however pressing either of the lock keys failed to illuminate any leds so I am guessing kernel panic based on that, in fact pressing enter, F2, esc etc made no difference either.

The HP doesnt have any power management functions in the bios, in fact it has very little in there however legacy USB support was disabled (as if that would make any difference).

There are no USB devices plugged in, and I have also tried removing both the battery and the PCMCIA wireless card, but this makes no difference!

Now, I was puzzled the 9.2 live DVD works fine yet the 9.1 pro DVD halts
so I downloaded the first 2 ISO's of Suse 9.2 pro from a set of 5 which were available on the web and you guessed it same problem,, same place...

to recap:
9.2 live DVD works,
9.1 pro DVD halts at the welcome screen,
9.2 pro CD's 1 & 2 both also halt at the welcome screen,
I have also tried creating boot floppies from these disks,,, but they also halted at the welcome screen.

Does anybody have any idea how to get round this problem, as I thought they all used the same loader.

Its not urgent or anything like that cos Slackware still works perfectly well on this laptop, but I was looking to try new things and quite fancied giving Suse a chance.

Thanks in advance for any help or ideas.

Scott

I dont have a solution for you but I have suse 9.0 personal on a dual boot system I also have windoes xp on the same system and sometimes it gets hung up when I turn the system off it locks up on the blue screen, I am still trying to get DSL and the printer to work so I have not got around to looking at this problem as also is a intermidiate problem, however when I loaded the software on to the hard drive it did get hunged up on that blue welcome screen and I had to re boot then it asked me for disk #2... just a bit of food for your thoughts...

I found a solution & if it isn't the damdest thing,,
Aparently HP Pavilion notebooks have a memory issue with Suse 9

You "must" set the onboard video memory to 16mb in the bios, it cannot be anything else.

(Suse shouldnt feel too bad about this,,, my Pavilion has an attitude problem with RH & Mandrake too)

I realise this is an old thread,, but a solution was found & I wanted to share it just in case it might help anybody else.

EDIT
I forgot to add, Im running a borrowed version of 9.2 pro & I'm extremely impressed with it.
I will continue to play around with it for a week or so, and if I'm still as impressed with it as Iam now (Which seems very likely) I'm gonna buy it and continue using it on a more permanent basis.