Greetings,

I've posted a couple of threads this week pertaining to my problems that have arisen in Fedora 10, and every time one thing goes wrong, it seems another bad thing follows close behind. So skipping all the details of my previous issue, I made a clean install of Fedora 10 yesterday. I'm dual-booting Windows XP/F10, and I had just formatted my entire hard drive three days ago, created one NTFS and one EXT3 partition, and installed Windows XP Home first on the NTFS. Booted it up, installed a few programs, worked on it for a while, and everything was running smoothly. I got my handy-dandy F10 install disks and proceeded to install F10 with KDE on the EXT3 partition. I noticed the installation took about twice the time as it did the first time I did it, but this is probably due to me choosing more packages to install instead of the "Customize Later" button.

Anyway, the installation was a success (supposedly) so the disk ejected and the system started rebooting. F10 loaded up as normal, except when it came to show the tri-colored loading bar with FEDORA 10 on the right-hand side. The bar loaded up normally, but when it "finished" loading, nothing happened. The white bar and FEDORA 10 were shown on the screen, and nothing else. I waited about ten minutes with no further progress, rebooted, got the same problem, and decided to see if I could wait it out. I figured it must be a first-time boot deal, Fedora was probably configuring some files and settings. So I ended up staring at the fully loaded white status bar for a full half an hour before I came to the conclusion that this probably wasn't going to solve itself.

Flash forward to today, I installed Fedora 10 for the third time this week. I had no idea how to uninstall Fedora, but I noticed the "Remove Linux partitions and install Fedora with normal configuration" option on the install disk, so I did it that way. An hour and a half and three cups of coffee later, the install finally finishes and the system reboots. The loading bar shows up and.... ****!!! Again! The bar finishes loading and hangs and hangs and hangs. So I stared at the status bar for five minutes, rebooted F10, and stared at the status bar for another ten minutes.

Okay guys, needless to say I am getting extremely frustrated with this process. I just want F10 with KDE and MP3 support! Should I have chose a different route instead of re-installing from the disc? i.e. Reformat the EXT3 partition manually, etc?

Please help a newbie in need. Thanks for your time.

Matt

EDIT: I have run the Rescue portion on the first disc to see if there was some automatic rescue option a la Windows XP. I din't find anything like this, but I was able to pull up a terminal and login as root with full permissions. It seemed to me like everything was in place... but then again, what do I know? Anyway, just throwing that out there in case anyone has a suggestion or if it's possible for me to fix the problem without reinstalling (again).

Hi,

Looks like you've been having a lot of "fun"!

Anyway please post the results to the following commands (as root)

/sbin/lspci

/sbin/lsusb

cat /etc/inittab

Have a look at /etc/inittab and see what default runlevel you are at. For example the line in inittab is :-

id:5:initdefault:

this means runlevel 5 - which is X11, which is what I am assuming you are having trouble with.

If your inittab is OK, please let us know whether the following file exists :- /etc/X11/xorg.conf

For future reference this is a great Fedora 10 howtos link http://www.fedoraguide.info/index.php?title=Main_Page

That should do for now. Good luck. I'll be watching for your response.

Load up Fedora and when the bar comes up, hit ctrl + esc, this should kill x and then display what it's doing, including any error messages. I suspect their might be a kernal panic going on that can not be seen from within x.

I ran the commands, but then I realized that I had no idea how to save the results. BUT, when I ran the cat command for inittab, it said there was no such file... I checked myself to make sure. Also,is there a way to print out a file of the response that I receive? Also, is there a way to save it on my NTFS partition since I can't boot us Linux in a graphical environment? I tried the following code:

This worked in my last install of Fedora 10, and in my previous version of FC6, but for some reason I'm getting an error message now. It's saying something like there's no such file or directory, but I already checked via Yum to make sure that ntfs-3g was installed. Is there another way to mount the NTFS partition?

And to r3sistance, did you mean pressing CTRL+Enter? I pressed CTRL+ESC but nothing happened. After I pressed CTRL+Enter, the text appeared, saying something about searching for a volume group, and that two were found, and that's all. It must be stuck at that point.

And thanks for the quick responses guys, I appreciate it.


EDIT: As far as the xorg.conf file, there is none that exists.

Also, I noticed that when I typed "reboot" in the terminal, I got an error message. Something to the effect of "Cannot send message; bad connection" so I have to do a hard reboot. Don't know if that pertains to my main issue, but thought it was worth mentioning

Matt,

Have you first checked your installation media (CDs)? When you install F10 you will get to a screen early on which asks you to check your installation media. Do this first and see if the media is ok. I only do installs from DVD media, so I'm not sure if the CD installs allow you to check every CD as you progress ?

If you have checked your install media, could you please let us know about your hardware. For example, CPU, RAM, HDDs, motherboard maybe. Did you get any results from the previous commands at all? You can save results to a file by doing

/sbin/lspci > savedfile
/sbin/lsusb >> savedfile

Not having an /etc/inittab sounds like the install did not work correctly at all. Check the media first and we'll go from there. Good luck.

I didn't check the CD's because they worked fine the first couple of times though... but I'll do that now and see what comes up.

I checked the two files mentioned above, and they do exist; I got results, but I'm not sure what they mean. Also, if I save the lspci and lsusb files, how can I access them using Windows? For some reason, my Windows partition cannot access the EXT3 drive that F10 is on. I'm assuming that Microsoft doesn't offer EXT3 support. As I said above, I tried to mount the NTFS partition, but I couldn't get it to work for me.

Here's some hardware details:
Dell Optiplex 210L
2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 processor
504 mb RAM (not sure which kind)
80 GB SATA hard drive (one NTFS and one EXT3 partition, dual-booting XP/F10)
Stock motherboard, not too sure on that detail


I'll edit this post in a little bit after I check my install media. Thank you

I have an Ubuntu machine that boots up but it never gives me the login prompt. it looks like its hung but when I do an Alt F2 or F3 I get tty2 or tty3 and can log in fine.

I thought may be same thing is happening to your machine?

Oh BTW do you get a menu at the boot up time by pressing escape?
If you do , you can load other OS files (sorry not familiar with the Fedora 10).

From what's been said, I would argee what people said above about a damaged install media, their missing files, and things don't look like they are working right, something got damaged, installed wrong.

The "Menu" you are on about is the grub boot loader, which Red Hat based distributions also use.

I forget most GUI shortcut keys but fairly sure it should be CTRL+ESC, but then I can't truly remember to be honest. Anyways the volume group would probably be the LVM2 drivers loading, which as most people don't use LVM it's generally going to not find a volume group anyways, so it's built to happily fail finding a volume group...

I'm not sure what you mean by "boot up time"... you mean before or after Fedora starts loading? After I start loading up Fedora, if I press escape, I get the "Loading volume group..." message stated above, and it hangs there for infinity. I'd try the ALT+F2 trick, but to be completely honest, I think I may have to reinstall Fedora (yet again!) Read on...

I was going to edit my last post, but I'll put it here for simplicity's sake. I just ran the "check install media" program for discs one, two, and three (because those are all that are needed for a basic install of F10). Discs two and three came back saying that they are both fine, but disc one came back with errors, apparently. I ran thru the disc checker thrice with disc one, kept coming back with the same error message.

This same thing happened to me when I FIRST installed Fedora 10 last week, but only with the first disc. I had to write the image onto another CD and try it again, and it worked fine. It also worked fine when I re-installed Fedora the first time, but then apparently it messed things up when I installed Fedora for the third time (try to stay with me here).

Anyway, the only thing I did differently between the times that the installation WORKED and the times that it failed, was that the first two time I installed F10, I kept the basic options for packages and repo's. The times when the installation failed, I picked customized programs and packages, but I kept the install path and default directories and other technical mumbo-jumbo the same.

So my point is, could this be the problem? The first disc worked for me twice already, why not now? Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and make another CD for the first install disc. My question is, could it be the file that's corrupt? I downloaded it off Fedora's official site via BitTorrent, should I try the download again, or take my chances and possibly convert another valuable CD into a worthless coaster (yes I am very broke right now )

Thanks for reading, and thank you for the responses, guys (and girls, possibly)

The fact it's stating that CD1 fails and CD1 holds most of the important data (generally it's just application data and installers on following CDs), that's the one you can't afford to have corrupted, it's possibly worth trying to redownload the first CD if the CDs are often corrupting but it might be worth waiting til they are corrupted before using them as tea coasters . Anyway I'd say redownload CD1 if you can... burn it, and hopefully that is issues over .

As to what Matey said, I get what he means, but I am almost certain it won't help you out with what your suffering from I am afraid. He was on about Grub when he mentioned the other OS files.

UPDATE:

Coming to you live from Fedora 10, it's me!

Yes, turns out the corrupted disk 1 was indeed my problem. Honestly, I don't think I would've had the common sense to simply check that it was in one piece if you guys hadn't suggested it... I'd probably be tearing my hair out without LQ, lol

Well I thank everyone who contributed their assistance to my issue. +1 Thanks for everybody!

Cheers,


Matt

This may not be your problem, but there's a "bug" in the way the newer kernels handle the high precision event timer for some CPUs; mostly AMD x86_64 ones, but it may effect others.

The symptom of the bug is that the kernel raises a "wait" for, usually, a disk event, but fails to note the event when it happens. Since this is a kernel "wait," everything appears to "hang" until something "jiggles the kernels elbow." Thus it often seems that the boot is "hung," when, in fact, all that's happened is your kernel is trying to "time" some event.

Anyhow, it's fairly easy to check if this is your problem: Just boot your system a, when the system seem to "hang," press the <shift> key. (I sometimes just hold it down for a while.) If your system boots, then you need to edit the kernel line in /boot/grub/grub.config to include the nohpet option.

If pressing the <shift> key doesn't help, then this wasn't your problem. (By the way, if you have a "disk access" light on your system, you can tell if the <sfift> trick is helping if, when you press it, you see some disk activity.)

Note: This bug also caused Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10 and 9.04 to appear to "hang" on my system during the boot until I added the nohpet option to my Ubuntu kernel lines and will, I suspect, effect other distributions as they move to newer kernel releases.