failure to boot

[Gerhard H. W. May]

> Gerhard H. W. May wrote:
>> I have now done that. The machine hangs at the same position during
>> booting. The last few lines on the screen are (I have to type this
>> manually):
>>
>> -------------------------
>> SELinux: Disabled at runtime.
>> SELinux: Unregistering netfilter hooks
>> INIT: version 2.85 booting
>> Setting default font (latarcyrheb-sun16):	[ok]
>>
>> Welcome to Fedora Core
>> Press 'I' to enter interactive startup.
>>
>> Starting udev:	[ok]
>> Initializing hardware...	storage network audio
>> ----------------------------
>>
>> All this is very cryptic to me.
>
> Hi Gerhard.
>
> Sorry you're having problems.
>
> I'm guessing that you're having trouble with the audio driver.

But FC2 did work on the same machine, and the test sound was fine.


> What happened here is that the Ctrl-C killed the start-up script
> /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit . The most important job that this had left to do
> was to remount the root filesystem as read-write. So Fedora tried
> booting with a read-only filesystem. This didn't work...
>
> There are two things for you to try, but to do this, you will need to 
> be
> able to edit files through a text terminal. And you will need a text
> terminal that can edit things.
>
> One way is to boot using the rescue CD, which should let you get at the
> files. Another way would be to use something like Knoppix.
>
> A third way would be to press "e" in grub, change the "ro" to "rw" in
> the kenel line, and add "1" at the end. Then you might still need to
> Ctrl-C out where you did before, but you should have an rewritable
> filesystem.
>
> I would *seriously* not recommend this for regular use!
>
> I don't know which editors you are familiar with, so I'm probably going
> to tell you to do things you aren't comfortable with. Please ask where 
> I
> go beyond your experience.
>
> In any case, you will want to mount your root filesystem and edit two
> files.
>
> Check where your root filesystem is mounted: use the /mount command. 
> You
> will want to edit files on the normal Fedora filesystem, not the tree
> that the rescue CD provides.
>
> Edit etc/modprobe.conf. Make a note of the line beginning "alias
> snd-card", then delete them. (If there's more than one line, then 
> delete
> that, too).

I' ve done that now and the boot process stopped at the same point. No 
change at all. I have then added the original lines back into the file 
(was I supposed to do that?) and went on to the next suggestion:

> If that doesn't work, edit /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit. On line 171, change
> "# IDE" to "echo -n IDE:Gerhard". Then see if that ever gets
> displayed...

Yes, it did. the last line before the boot process hung now reads:

Initializing hardware... IDE:Gerhard storage network audio

Unfortunately, it still hangs at that point.

> Sorry this is so complex: we're diving right into the heart of the
> start-up here.
>
> James.

So far that was not too complex. Thanks for trying to help. I wonder 
what else I could try?

Having said that, what could be the reason that FC2 worked, and FC3 
doesn't? I installed FC2 only very recently, on this Tecra laptop which 
had been set up for dual-booting Windows 98 and some older version of 
Suse linux. I chose to remove all Linux installations (because I wanted 
to get rid of Suse. A few days later FC3 was released and I did not 
spend any more time with FC2. Could there be a problem with the 
partitions and this bootloader program which interferes with the 
operating systems? Windows seems to take forever as well to start up 
(well, even longer than I remember it doing).

Anyway, any help is appreciated.

Gerhard