Hi!

A few days ago, my Dell Dimension 8300, running Suse 9.3, wouldn't boot anymore. After choosing suse in the boot menu the screen went blank and after a few seconds the computer restarted itself and returned to the boot menu.

I can still boot Windows, and also booting Suse in failsafe mode worked so I started trying out each of the additional options in isolation and soon found that specifying "acpi=off" solved the problem.

Yesterday I was experimenting with different boot options and tried "apm=off" and it booted! All seemed well and ACPI was obviously enabled. This morning though, it wouldn't boot unless I specified "acpi=off".


A few questions:

1) What could cause the boot failure suddenly? I haven't installed anything recently. Honestly!

2) What do I lose by not activating ACPI, exccept that the computer won't turn off automatically when I shut down?

3) The "/var/log/messages" file has no entries for the time periods when boot has failed. Are there any other log that could help me diagnose the problem?


Below are slected entries from various log files. Can't see that anything is logged when booting with ACPI fails.


The last few log entries in /var/log/acpid. July 6 is when it stopped
working:
----------------------------------------
[Tue Jul 4 09:15:52 2006] starting up
[Tue Jul 4 09:15:52 2006] 0 rules loaded
[Tue Jul 4 09:15:53 2006] client connected from 7288[0:0]
[Tue Jul 4 09:15:53 2006] 1 client rule loaded
[Tue Jul 4 17:20:28 2006] exiting
[Wed Jul 5 07:31:10 2006] starting up
[Wed Jul 5 07:31:10 2006] 0 rules loaded
[Wed Jul 5 07:31:10 2006] client connected from 7153[0:0]
[Wed Jul 5 07:31:10 2006] 1 client rule loaded
[Wed Jul 5 21:23:56 2006] exiting
----------------------------------------


ACPI related entries in /var/log/messages:
----------------------------------------
Jul 4 09:15:24 gunnar kernel: ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:01:00.0[A] -> GSI 16
(level, low) -> IRQ 185
:
Jul 4 09:15:51 gunnar kernel: ACPI: Power Button (FF) [PWRF]
:
Jul 5 07:30:44 gunnar kernel: ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:01:00.0[A] -> GSI 16
(level, low) -> IRQ 177
:
Jul 5 07:31:10 gunnar kernel: ACPI: Power Button (FF) [PWRF]
----------------------------------------


Some rows from /var/log/boot.msg:
----------------------------------------
<4>Linux version 2.6.11.4-21.12-smp (geeko@buildhost) (gcc version 3.3.5
20050117 (prerelease) (SUSE Linux)) #1 SMP Wed May 10 09:38:20 UTC 2006
<6>BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
<4> BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 00000000000a0000 (usable)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000000f0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
<4> BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 000000007ff74000 (usable)
<4> BIOS-e820: 000000007ff74000 - 000000007ff76000 (ACPI NVS)
<4> BIOS-e820: 000000007ff76000 - 000000007ff97000 (ACPI data)
<4> BIOS-e820: 000000007ff97000 - 0000000080000000 (reserved)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000fec00000 - 00000000fec10000 (reserved)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000fecf0000 - 00000000fecf1000 (reserved)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000fed20000 - 00000000fed90000 (reserved)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000fee00000 - 00000000fee10000 (reserved)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000ffb00000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
:
<4>Kernel command line: root=/dev/sdb2 vga=0x346 selinux=0 splash=silent
resume=/dev/sdb1 acpi=off
:
<6>ACPI: Subsystem revision 20050211
<6>ACPI: Interpreter disabled.
<6>Linux Plug and Play Support v0.97 (c) Adam Belay
<6>pnp: PnP ACPI: disabled
----------------------------------------




I would be very grateful if someone could shed some light on this problem!

TIA,
Gunnar