Install seemed to go great via the ISO I burned to a DVD. Just told Fedora to replace the Linux install I already had (Mandrake 10.1, which was fine, but was curious about Fedora). It seemed to do it well, leaving my XP Home edition alone, but, when it tries to boot, it hangs at "Enabling swap space:", so Fedora has never actually come up on the system. I've given Linux about half of my 200 GB drive. Running an AMD 64-bit 2800+ system with 1 GB memory.
TIA,
Tom Ewald

It may be that you have a problem with your swap space partition (or file).

You should be able to boot into a rescue system using the DVD; from here you can reformat it using (hint: don't get the wrong partition or you'll wreck something).

If that doesn't fix the problem, try disabling swap (I find I don't need it much with 256Mb on SuSE so with 1Gb on Fedora you should be fine). Delete the line in /etc/fstab pointing to your swap partition. That's a stop-gap measure at best but it'll let you boot the system in order to see if anything else is causing problems.

I have the same problem. I shut down cleanly from the login screen, so there must be something wrong with the way FC3 handles swap.



I booted from FC3 install CD with

linux rescue

then did a # chroot /mnt/sysimage

But the mkswapfs command wasn't avaible. Has it been removed from FC3?

Quote:

If that doesn't fix the problem, try disabling swap (I find I don't need it much with 256Mb on SuSE so with 1Gb on Fedora you should be fine). Delete the line in /etc/fstab pointing to your swap partition. That's a stop-gap measure at best but it'll let you boot the system in order to see if anything else is causing problems.

I commented out the line in question, but it still hangs in the same place. Perhaps that fstab-something that manages /etc/fstab changes it back on reboot...

This kind of thing usually makes me dump a distro, but if I figure out a solution to this problem, I'd be prepared to fix a RH Enterprise box with the same problem...

Marco

I had this problem too after I did some changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. I don't know why it stops at enabing swap space. After I've rolled back the changes it worked again.

Althought the boot process appears to hang on a text mode screen, it actually says [OK] after it, thus:

Enabling swap space [OK]

Which would indicate the swap space service ran successfully.

In fact, there is an X display running, if you switch to X using Ctrl + Alt + F7, you will see that it has hung on something else... in my case, it was the samba share I mounted at boot time. It doesn't time out after a certain time, and just keeps going indefinitely.

I think this is most definitely a bug, since a network share may be inaccessible, for instance if the Windows PC is turned off. The mount process should terminate after a certain amount of time.
(The same share is accessible through Konqueror, using the smb://<name>/<path> protocol)

Has anyone else noticed that halfway through the boot process, it switches from X (bitmap) to console (text)... and it usually switches back to X towards the end, before the login screen? Is that intentional?
I would rather have it in X the whole time, not that I reboot very often... it is a server OS, after all.

Also, I have noticed sendmail and something called s-manager take an abnormally long time to start. Furthermore, the service lists at "webmin -> system -> bootup and shutdown" and in Red Hat's services configuration tool differ. For instance, webmin had the intelligence to detect the redhat.no-ip script in /etc/init.d giving me the option to start it at boot time, whereas RedHat's tool is oblivious to its presence. It works regardless wether webmin turns it on or not.

Ah well, I'm happy with my Fedora system at the moment, but I won't be installing any updates for a while, that's for sure.

Thanks to Everyone who replied.

Hmmmm. What if Control+Alt+F7 just gives you a blank screen? I'm having the same problem with my Fedora Core 3 distro and when I do that key combo, I don't get X back. I deleted that swap line in the /etc/fstab file too. I have a gig of ram so I figured it wouldn't cause any problems. Still, I'm still stuck at the same hangup though. Any ideas?

If your computer's truly hung then pressing buttons on the keyboard won't make any difference. It sounds like you still have the schedular running at least. Can you log in on other virtual terminals (Alt+F1 through Alt+F6)?

If your system is hanging at “enabling swap space” and you don't have any swap-space enabled, then it's likely that it's hanging at the next stage in the boot process.

I would pass the command-line option s at the boot prompt (see other threads for how to do this) to start up in single-user mode. Then check /var/log/messages and other log files to see if anything weird has happened. You probably want to check XOrg.0.log (XFree86.0.log?) as well if this happened after upgrading X.

Thanks for pointing out how I could get to those log files. I find out through /var/log/messages that sendmail was taking close to 10 minutes to bootup. Seing as I don't really need a mail server, I killed it at every runlevel using chkconfig. It still goes to full screen at that point for a few seconds when it gets to that point on bootup but that seems to have solved the problem.

Try this. Unplug your network cable. I had the same problem on 3 different machines. Turns out my machines suddenly didn't like the DHCP my firewall was doing. Once I got in, I plugged it back in, manually set my IP's and I don't have the problem anymore. Didn't have anything to do with swap file size or memory.

I notice the same problem too. But as in other replies, the problem lies in the swap.. Make swap is ok.. But sometimes you would notice a LABEL=xxx-swap option set in /etc/passwd. I agree LABEL on ext2 throught e2label.. But swap ? I changed this to the actual device /dev/sda2 . No hanging now

Sorry it should read as /etc/fstab instead of /etc/passwd

I had the same problem .... just look in to /etc/fstab and remove all unwanted entries...only wrong entries in fstab wud lead to this error msg.

Regards

Warning. If your distro boots first in text mode then in graphical mode, and when loading something in graphical mode fails screen returns to text mode and for some reason (I guess a resolution adjust) last thing you see is swap initialization, so this lead your mind to a problem in swap, but don't. Change you inittab to boot in runlevel 3 so you don't have this resolution change and confusion.

Hello ! everybody ..this is my first question in this site.
i'm from Bangladesh and a University of computer science.

i'm using Debian(2.6.18)and RHEL 4 now in my system dual booting.
At first 5 or 6 days i had no problem in booting to both of those
linux. But, i'm now facing problem in RHEL 4.

When it booting ..initializes hardwares & at the last point it hangs
on "Enabling swap space". and never booting to desktop and restarts sometimes. But there, is no problem with Debian.

I had use both of the linux in the first two drive of my hard disk.
It seems to problem in swap spacing. But, can't fix it.


My system : Intel 865GBF (intel chipset)
RAM 512 DDR 2
HDD 80 GB

I have provide space :

RHEL 4 [ 12 GB (swap 1050MB ) ]

Debian [ 16 GB (1050MB) ]

stop NIS domain ... with command # chkconfig ypserv off
from services.. stop ypserv,ypbind,yppasswd,ypxfrd
its done..then reboot ..and see magic !!