Well, this is quite the purplexing problem, which I can find no reasonable explanation for. The system is a P3 550MHz on a Seanix Columbia III motherboard. 192MB ram, etc etc.. nothing special.

This problem seems only to be occuring with Mandrake (or it could be the 2.6 kernel as well). I install it, everything goes smooth, no errors.. but on reboot something odd happens:

- 10.1 (Official): System reboots, Lilo loads, I choose any option, and the system just stops loading after it says "Bios data check successful", no errors, no nothing

- 10.1 (Community)/10.0 (Official): System reboots, Lilo loads, I choose any option, and the system will boot up once for me, I don't have to even change anything, just enter a login and type "shutdown -r now", the system will reboot again, and hang just like 10.1 Official. I can't figure out what could have changed between me booting, typing shutdown -r now, and letting it shutdown.. but that's only half the mystery.

Windows (NT & 9x), Redhat Linux 9, and Knoppix all load, and work properly. But i'm bent on using Mandrake, I don't have the time to learn how another distro works.

Any help would be VERY appreciated.

BTW, i also tried booting with the "nodma" "acpi=off" "noapic" "nolapic" options.

I started having this problem after I installed an external usb hard drive. All went well until I rebooted and then the 'BIOS check successful' freezeup happened.

I changed the fstab entries for the external drive to 'noauto', which cleared up the boot problem, but then my desktop system icons dissapeared. My solution was not to power up the external drive until the machine had booted up.

Of course, you didn't say you had an external drive, I just wanted to say that's the only time I've noticed this particular problem.

Michael

Adding to what he posted for you, usually the "hang" occurs on the subsequent probe, service start, mount, etc.

In other words the last message you see was the last successful event, and not indicative of the actual problem.

That's right. During boot I get to:

(from /var/log/messages)
Initializing USB controller (ohci-hcd): succeeded
Initializing USB controller (ehci-hcd): succeeded
Mount USB filesystem succeeded

-> boot process halts here, at least on screen.

scsi.agent[1008]: disk at /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.3/usb3/3-3/3-3:1.0/host0/0:0:0:1

The above scsi.agent entry is the first of four entries for my card reader (/dev/sda-sdd). After that follow four entries for usb printer drivers. I don't have a usb printer, so I don't know why they're there. The last line for usb is:
kernel: drivers/usb/input/hid-input.c: event field not found.

So if my usb hard drive was installed, this would be the point that it would be detected, and /dev/sde would be created.

But since I can't get a log when it fails to boot all the way up, I don't have a clue as to what happens at this point. I suppose I should start by finding out why usbcore is trying to register a usb printer, when my printer is parallel.

Sorry, it looks like a mess. Even when I start from scratch, I end up stuck at the same point. Time to dig deeper.

Thanks,

Michael

Yep, been there....

Same problem here.

In my case it was the hotplug program's entries which caused the kernel to look for USB devices upon boot.

The devices were not available (disconnected or long gone) but it was still looking for them at boot.

I forgot what I deleted but it was definitely something associated with hotplug... one of the 000000:00000 type entries in the /etc/hotplug folder chain, that did away with this.

cool but does it work if you have the devic in the usb bort (she was in the usb/ect.. does it boot

ps hold i (loads interactive setup) and when a message shows the ineracive setup on then hit enter tell u get to the hang up and type"n" then return it will not loadthat thing this woul help isolate te pro so you know whats acually halting the sys