FC5 startup breaks if mouse is touched
 

Dear All,

I have S500OPSL server board with Fedora Core 5 installed. When FC5 startup progress bar is filled and it is time to show the login screen the video card stops receiving signals (monitor's light goes red) if the mouse has been touched at any time before login screen. The same behaviour with/without installing GNOME (just with XWindows). The video card, keyboard and mouse are properly recognized. I went in step-by-step mode during boot and could not see any failure which could point to the problem.

Could anybody help to solve the problem ?

Thanks very much in advance.

That sounds very much like an interrupt conflict. If your BIOS allows, try moving the mouse to a different interrupt.

Thank you very much for your reply.

Though there is no possibility to change the IRQ of the mouse port from BIOS but I changed the mouse from PS/2 to COM port. The result is the same. In addition I changed the IRQ of COM port still without success.

I noticed that sometimes when the mouse is plugged in the port, the disabling of the monitor (as well as keyboard and mouse) can happen even if I do not touch the mouse. But when I unplug the mouse from the mainboard I could always see a normal startup.

Any other ideas ?

Thank you for any help.

If you are not using the PS/2 ports, did you disable them (to free the interrupt)?

Try checking /var/log/messages and dmesg for errors when the problem occurs, or during initialization. You can also check IRQ assignments with 'cat /proc/interrupts'.

You can also try booting with the parameters (one at a time):

pci=biosirq
pci=routeirq
noapic
acpi=noirq

Thank you for your continuous help.

I used all four parameters

pci=biosirq
pci=routeirq
noapic
acpi=noirq

as a kernel argument but non of them helped the situation. Though after passing "pci=biosirq" I could see a normal startup on the first try but after issuing "shutdown -r 0" I faced the same hang-up situation.

I also was messing with BIOS PCI configuration and after disabling the Onboard NIC ROM the situation seems a bit better, that is most of the time I can see a normal login screen (with moving the mouse during boot), though sometimes it can again hang.

How could I disable the mouse PS/2 IRQ ? Do I need to configure the kernel source and recompile it ? or there exists an easier solution ?

Thank you very much in advance.

I forgot to mention that the /var/log/messages seems to be ok. The only strange thing I could see is the following message:

Nov 11 12:48:50 localhost kernel: ACPI Exception (acpi_processor-0681): AE_NOT_FOUND, Processor Device is not present [20060707]

This message is shown four times (which goes for each processor core on the motherboard). Inspite of this message I can see that all four processors are recognized.

I could not find any description of this exception in forums. May be you could point the source of this message ?

Thank you for all your help.

Depending on your PC of course, have you considered trying a USB mouse? There have been posts here in various forums, from people having probs with PS/2 mice, and switching to USB solved the prob.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=486366

IGF

It appears that your BIOS needs to be updated (invalid ACPI entries). You can try booting with kernel parameter 'noacpi', but you will lose some functionality.

Thank you very much for all your help.

I wished to understand this mouse problem as this could relate to some hardware problem. As I can understand this is more a Fedora bug than a hardware problem. As far as this server is going to be used as a cluster node, the mouse support will hardly be needed in any case. So at the time being I will admit that in text console mode the hardware is working fine.

I already set the latest available update into the BIOS and the ACPI Exception is still showing up. I hope this problem will not noticeably affect the overall performance.

Thank you for all your support.