Boot hangs at "starting pcmcia"

nfisk · 12-02-2002, 04:11 PM

Suddenly, my Dell Inspiron laptop can't boot into Linux (Red Hat 7.3) anymore. It consistently hangs at the "starting pcmcia" entry, and I haven't been able to figure out how to get past that point. I've tried choosing "interactive startup," but it appears that the pcmcia module is loaded before the startup actually becomes interactive (it never asks me, it just goes ahead and loads it). It doesn't matter if the actual cards are in or out.

How do I skip this entry in the startup sequence? And, once I've done that, how do I troubleshoot for the problem?

--nfisk

PS: Thanks to all who responded with suggestions for how to solve my problem with the WLAN adapter. I don't know if this problem could be related to that one; they are, of course, both related to pcmcia. I did read your replies but didn't really get a chance to try them before this happened.

bax · 12-02-2002, 04:27 PM

Try hitting Cntrol C when it trys to start PCMCIA. Or upgrade to 8.0. Works great on my Inspiron 8100 even w/ wireless!

balam · 12-02-2002, 05:38 PM

right, this happens to when you have set to dhcp, so the system is actually looking for a dhcp to get a lease, and if yoo do not have one abaliable so keeps looking,

solution try to make a static ip. ex 192.168.1.8

hope this helps

nfisk · 12-04-2002, 04:00 AM

Thanks for the suggestions, but...

bax: I had already tried Ctrl-C, and it does nothing; I forgot to mention this. The only thing that has any effect once the machine is hung is Ctrl-Alt-Del.

balam: I can't figure out how to change network parameters since I can't get past the pcmcia step in the startup sequence. Besides, if dhcp were the problem, wouldn't it help to simply remove the card (the network adapter is a PCMCIA card)? It doesn't.

The machine still boots just fine into Windoze 98.

--nfisk

KevinJ · 12-04-2002, 08:26 AM

Have you tried booting into single user mode?

Are you using grub or lilo? Graphical or text login screen?

-KevinJ

nfisk · 12-04-2002, 08:41 AM

Trying again, I did manage to bypass the pcmcia step by using "interactive startup." When everything was up, I started pcmcia manually. It hung, and I could see that ifdown was using a lot of CPU. Unlike while booting, I could now press Ctrl-C -- which got me the normal beeps and a working network connection. I was subsequently able to stop and restart the pcmcia service at will without any problems. Haven't tried a reboot though.

Thanks,
--nfisk