there's a question that always bothers me
 

every time when i boot up my computer my fedora core 2 hangs at audit ( some crazy numbers) initialized for more than 5 mins is this normal or it's just me ? is there a possible way to reduce the waiting time ?

5 minutes is not normal...i don't use fedora, so i can't offer advice, other than to say...it's not normal

do you have that line audit ( some crazy numbers) initialized when you boot up your computer ?

I use fedora core 2.
on my Athlon 1333mhz 512 meg ram 6gig hard disk, fedora core 2 boots in just under 40 seconds....

But i do boot a custom compiled kernel, and i made a custom run-level (4)

on a default install it booted in about 1 minute.

No, its not normal to take that long.

What is the message on screen when it hangs ?
What is the output of 'dmesg'
what hardware on you running on ?

1) it doesnt give me any error messages, it just hangs there for 5 mins, than go on to the next steps, it's pretty strange
2) i am running on a amd 3200 xp, 1gb double channel ddr memory. gforce 5900 fx
i think i hardware are fast enough to handle the system, it got be something else.

i have a raid card inside my machine could this be the problem ?
thank you for your quick reply

when i said error message i meant to say.... what is the task (line on the screen) that is shown Just before, and just after the 5 minute wait ?

The raid card is probably to blame !

my friend had fedora core 1, and a very new machine.
the kernel had not been compiled wih the apropriate drivers.

do you need the Raid card ?

unplugging the raid card (or turning it off on the bios if it is on-board)
will probably fix this.

i bet it starts looking for hard disks that do not exist... all the waty up to /dev/hdh (my firends did)

is the raid card by nvidia ?
is your motherboard by nvidia ?

if so, have you installed the nvidia drivers (www.nvidia.com) ?

well, as matter of facts I have 2 raid cards, 1 is silcon image, the other is built in by Asus, the chipest is Nvidia
and i htink, you are right, i should go to their website and do some research there,

i went up to there websites both of them, Nvidia offers this system unitiles package, but silicon didn't offers anything. anyway i installed it, reboot it, but my system still hangs up there.

p.s two of my hard drives are connected with Silicon raid card.

before we worry about raid too much.....

so, whats the computer Actually doing that takes 5 mins ?

well, it says red hat nash core(ver. number i dont quite remeber ) starting

Well, nash ist starting and then the systen hangs.

It *can* indicate that there is something hanging in the initrd (initial RAM disk). As already said, it *can* but it does not
necessary mean that.

nash is a small, yet powerfull, let's call it "shell" for executing the linuxrc script in the initial ram disk.

After nash, INIT is executed, but in order to do this the root filesystem needs to be mounted.
So there is maybe a problem in mounting the root filesystem (e.g. root device hangs, etc.)

Therefore we need more information about what'a actually going on during boot. So we need to increase the
level of verbosity during boot.

If you are using the GRUB Loader, take a look on the file /boot/grub/grub.conf .

If there you can find "quit" as boot parameter, then delete it and save the grub.conf file. This will increase the level of verbosity during
the boot process.

If you are using LILO then take a look on the lilo.conf file. Since I use GRUB I suggest that you take a look on the lilo.conf
manpage for parameter settings. I *think* that you have to enter verbose=5 in the global section of lilo.conf, but consult
man lilo.conf to be 100% sure.

I would also suggest that you take a look on your initrd image.

The initrd Image is located in your /boot directory and is named like initrd-2.x.y.img, where 2.x.y is the kernel level.

Copy this image to a different directory, e.g. /tmp

cp /boot/initrd-2.x.y.img /tmp
Do not forget to replace x and y according to your kernel level e.g.: initrd-2.6.7-rc2.img

change into the destination directory and decompress the initrd image
cd /tmp
gunzip -S .img initrd-2.x.y.img

This will produce a uncompressed image (now without .img extension in the file name) of the initial ram disk, which then can be mounted as loop device

Create a temporary mount point for initrd and mount the decompressed image:

mkdir /tmp/initrd-mnt
mount /tmp/initrd-2.x.y /tmp/initrd-mnt -o loop

(Remark: gunzip produced an uncompressed image of the original file,
that does not have the .img extension in the file name)

Change now into the initrd mount-point
cd /tmp/initrd-mnt
In the subdirectory ./lib (/tmp/initrd-mnt/lib) you can find the modules being loaded at stratup

linuxrc (/tmp/initrd-mnt/linuxrc) is the script executed by nash.
Take a look at it
vi /tmp/initrd-mnt/linuxrc

If you find there some commands that appear to be strange, they are all listed in the nash manpage
(man nash)