I finaly made the step to linux for good. I got Suse 9.1 and everything works fine, exept that ridiculously long boot-up time. You know, when you see the Suse logo and the loading bar. The loading bar stays empty for about 5 minutes and then suddenly it fills in less then 10 seconds. Could it be something with my hardware having trouble to be recognized by linux?

I hope someone can help, cause waiting that long in front of a pc screen seems like an eternity.

In the log I see hde=no response
hdf= no response

That's where it lasts so long before the boot-up goes on

Thank you

Click F2 during boot up time to see what it is doing? If anything it is more interesting.

I haave this problem as well. the f2 key does nothing during most of the booting. I did look in the log and see that its looking for hde, hdf over and over, all I have is hda, and two cd roms hdb and hdc I think. What is really weird is that I have the Identical machine at home, with suse9.1, and no hang. I did reinstall and no change

Asus A7N8X MB
Althon 1800 processor
ati all in wonder board
bios set to default on all settings
512 ram
antec case (only kidding)

Can anyone help I've seen this question other places but no answers
thanks

try deleting the /dev/hde* and /dev/hdf* files. if they dont exist, try creating them with this:

cd /dev
mknod -m 660 hde b 33 0 ; chgrp disk hde
mknod -m 660 hde1 b 33 1 ; chgrp disk hde1
mknod -m 660 hde2 b 33 2 ; chgrp disk hde2
Continue for further partitions - I'm sure you see the pattern
mknod -m 660 hdf b 33 64 ; chgrp disk hdf
mknod -m 660 hdf1 b 33 65 ; chgrp disk hdf1
mknod -m 660 hdf2 b 33 66 ; chgrp disk hdf2
Ditto

This is assuming you don't actually _have_ hde and f...

your assumption is correct..........I'll give it a try tomight..........thanks v much

I'd wait a while so anyone who think it would be really dangerous can point it out... I can't think what damage it would do, but I might be wrong.

Wonderful, looks like a decent solution. Gonna try this when I get back home. I will confirm the result asap
Thanks help helping !!!!!

I had the same problem as mentioned in my above post. I solved the problem. I have an ASUS A7N8X MB . What i finally did was ser the jumper for the serial ATA settings to dislable ( default is enable), the jumper pin has to cover pins 2 and 3 to disable.

Then just for the hell of it I removed the cmos battery and cleared the RTC RAM

Then it booted up like a charm.

I must say, I am just a linux desktop user, hope this is helpfull to someone

Going to try this right now. Thanks a lot !!!!
I have same MB as you, so my hopes are raising

Thank you so much scottsteibel!!!!!!!! I've been struggling for weeks trying to fix the problem. I can't believe that such a simple thing was the the solution.
Everything works like it should now and my boot time is just a mather of seconds !!!!!