We are installing suse 9.1 for a client on dual 64 bit AMD processors. The motherboard got a serial ata raid system. the Os installs and boots fine in 32bit mode. But when we try to install it in 64bit, eveything goes smooth except when the system boots from hard disk for the first time, it halts at one particular stage :-

system boot control: running /etc/init.d/boot.local

Does anyone know why it stops here?

On a vanilla install of SuSE 9.1, rc.local is empty so it's unlikely that it's stopping there because of anything in the boot scripts.

There can be any number of reasons why a system can freeze up during boot; I have a K7 that locks up occasionally but only ever during booting; this seemed to be made worse by installing a USB mouse.

Generally, this is a problem with buggy hardware or “non-standard” features of a driver. The first thing to do is to run a memory test, because if your RAM isn't working well, you won't get very far. There's a good memory test utility on the first SuSE install disk.

You can try passing options like nodma to clear the problem; you could also try unplugging different bits of hardware (keyboard, mouse, scanner, etc.) to see if any of those are the culpret.

Hope that's of some help,

— Robert J. Lee