(AMD Athlon 64, 512 RAM (384 usable), 160mb HD, ATI Radeon XPress 200 Graphics Card)


Hello,


Well, I had posted once before about considering Suse Linux 9.3 Pro, and went ahead and bought a new system and installed it. It was a pleasant experience and it worked well for about 4 sessions. And then, I had the following issue:

On my fifth login attempt, I was brought to a boot load screen, selected Suse Linux 9.3 (Failsafe was also an option). The system went through its start up procedures (Initializing Hardware, Starting Services, etc.), but then stopped at a black screen with an X in the center. At which point, it froze. I tried stating KDE in Failsafe mode and received the following information:
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Time.C Detected 2193.713 mhz Processor
Console: Colour VGA+ 80x25
Dentry cache hash table entries: 65536 (order 7, 524288 bytes)
Inode cache hash table entries: 32768 (order 6, 262144 bytes)
Memory: 378952k/392128k available (2167k kernel code, 12392k reserved, 1158k data, 168k init)
Security Framework v1.0.0 intialized
SELinux: disabled at boot
Mount cache hash table entries: 256 (order 0, 4096 bytes)
CPU L1 cache: 64K (bytes/line), D cache 64K (bytes/line)
CPU L2 cache: 512K (64 bytes/line)
CPU AMD Athlon 64(tm) Processor 3200+ stepping 00 checking if image is initramfs...it is
Using local APIC NMI watchdog using perfctr0
Using IO-APIC 2
Using local APIC Timer Interrupts
Detected 12.46 mhz APIC Timer
NET: register protocol family 16
PCI: Using configuration type 1
mtrr: v2.0 (20020519)
APCI: Subsystem revision 20050211
APCI: Interpreter disabled
PCI: Probing PCI Hardware
PCI: Probing PCI Hardware (bus 00)
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After this, I could not proceed any further. I am thinking the following are possible problems:

1. I did not create a boot partition, only a large root and smaller swap partition (following YAST suggestion after electing to erase the Windows partitions)
2. I did not select whether I wanted an installation for AMD 64 architecture, I just put the first DVD in (which was for both 64 and 32 bit installations) and followed the prompts (and the first 40 pages of the Novel Administration Guide).
3. I did try to configure (unsuccessfully) a network card, though i am not sure how this would effect booting.
4. I did not see the ATI Graphics card in the YAST hardware detection screen (though for sound card an ATI Technologies Inc. card was detected).

None of the documentation and user guides I purchased cover this scenario.

I submitted a support request to Suse/Novel but would be interested in your opinions.

Thanks for your assistance.

The first thing in could suggest is, try using a different boot loader, most likely you're using LiLO, if you are try using GRUB, on if you are using grub, then try using Lilo.
Looks like your computer hangs when the system is probing a PCI hardware. Maybe try reinstalling Linux, and use the default partitions, or just select it so it will use the whole hard drive. But , if you can get into failsafe, or a terminal window, login as root, and switch to level 3, with the "init 3" command, this way you will shut thexserver off, and make your changes to the bootloader, just by loading yast2. Then "init 5" should take you back to graphical mode.

I really hope you get some assistance from SuSe, cause they are really limited with helping others, it's somewhat upseting. They become more and more as Microsoft, unless you pay you don't get help, or real help anyways.

Good Luck. I really hope it works out for you.