I'm booting Mandrake 10.1 on a Dell Dimension 8250. After running (booting) without problems for about 2 weeks the system now hangs (and stops) on "Loading USB printer" -- the catch is I don't have a printer hooked up to the system. There is a USB mouse and keyboard but no other USB devices.

Sometimes it gets past this fine and then hangs (and stops) on the "Checking for new hardware." Other times (very occasionally) it goes through and boots up just fine.

Anyone seen this before and/or have any suggestions

I have a similar problem with mandrake 10.1 (a similar thing happens with SuSE 9.1 live eval CD). In my case the system (Athlon XP2000+ 1Gb RAM) hangs after "loading USB printer" when I have my printer plugged in (Epson CX6400). If I unplug the printer and hard-reboot, the system comes up fine. After chasing it for a while, this is what I found:

The hangup isn't really anything to do with the USB printer, rather it hangs on the startup of hotplug. To get past it, change
HOTPLUG_RC_usb=yes
to
HOTPLUG_RC_usb=no
in
/etc/sysconfig/hotplug

Bad news is that some or all of your USB devices won't work.

More info for anyone who might be able to help fix the problem rather than work around it:
It looks like it starts in
/etc/rc.d/init.d/usb
with the section
if [ "$COLD_USB" = 1 -a -x /etc/hotplug/usb.rc ]; then
/etc/hotplug/usb.rc start &
fi

working around the hang-up and manually restarting the usb hotplug service with
/etc/hotplug/usb.rc restart
hangs with no output. ^C will not kill it, you have to kill the terminal you are running it in.

After killing the terminal and opening another,
[root@Desktop somewhere]$ /etc/hotplug/usb.rc status
USB Status for kernel: Linux 2.6.8.1-12mdk i686

USB up; bus count is 0

and it hangs again...

kill, open another again...
[root@Desktop somewhere]# /etc/hotplug/usb.rc stop
works fine but trying to start it again hangs.

I don't know enough about the USB subsystem or shell scripting to go much furter.

On a side note, the hardware works fine under the other installed OS (WIN_XP)

I have the same problem using Mandrake 10.1 on fairly standard hardware. I also found that a hard reset is the only way to get the system working.

Prior to shutting down the system, if I stop 'cups' in the 'Services' section of Mandrake Control Center, then the problem does not seem to occur [as often?]... [and I also untick the box for loading cups on boot]. For printing, cups needs to be started again when the system is up and running.

However, this is only a partial solution; and I cannot tell if it always works. It is also very inconvenient.

Any further ideas for a solution would be very welcome.

Also, with a hard reset, you are asked whether you want to force a filesystem integrity check with 'y' for yes, [not the default]. This takes 20 mins or so on a large hard drive. Would anyone know what are the (dis)advantages of doing so?

It's a bug in the default kernel that ships with that version of Mandrake. Upgrade the kernel to the latest stable one from Mandrake Cooker or RPMfind.net, or switch to a different distribution. I ended up going to Fedora for other reasons, but that also fixed my problem.

regards,

Sparx

To all good people!

Please check this workaround.

In file "/etc/rc.d/init.d/usb" after the string (No 123. in 10.2 scripts):

mount_proc_usb

insert the string:

sleep 10

Value 10 I just like. I did a number of reboots and shutdown-reboot and never got
the problem back. All this is based on some old problem in some old SUSE distribution.