I have SuSE 9.1 on a desktop with Athlon XP3200 processor and VIA chipset.

I have been running SUsE on a 10Gb partition with no problems, except that occasionally, the bootup process fails. The point at which it fails, is when the sound hardware is being initialised. However, I have not made any changes to the hardware. In fact, I can boot up into SuSE OK, and then reboot, and then have the problem. I can them power off the machine, and try again, and I still cannot bootup.

Later on, I'll try again, and it boots up. It is therefore really random and there is no pattern.

Could it be that there is something going on during the boot process which I cannot see? I have tried booting in failsafe mode, and it seems to then get stuck at a point where it is apparently writing transaction logs to a hde device.

Should I just boot up and wait, or should I be considering looking at some faulty hardware?

NB: The PC boots up into Windows XP no problem (but bear in mind that as it usually boots up into SuSE, I don't think the Windows partition is the problem).

This will be a tough problem to trouble shoot because it's intermittent. I read somewhere, some time ago, about a boot failure where irq sharing was involved between a nic and a sound card. My apologies that I can't remember where it was, I may google it later. Your other options are to start swapping cards, pci slots, etc., and see if anything shows up. More often than not I've seen this problem with faulty hardware. You may want to check out your power supply first. Hope something here helps.
good luck.

Well, I actually read your reply after I had fixed the problem, but guess what - it was in fact down to to a conflict of resources!

By moving the PCI modem to a different slot, the PC now boots no problem. I should have suspected this was the fault, as when I boot the PC into WinXP, the modem was flagged as having a resource conflict with another device.

Thanks a lot anyway!

Hello,

I Googled reiserfs problems and read an article on reiserfs on LinuxToday or such. It had information on an issue with reiserfs and Via chipset.
Hope this helps,

Roger