failure to boot

[James Wilkinson]

Gerhard H. W. May is having trouble: FC3 is failing to boot.

I suggested:
> 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).

Gerhard replied:
> I' ve done that now and the boot process stopped at the same point.

Oh well.

> No 
> change at all. I have then added the original lines back into the file 
> (was I supposed to do that?)

Probably a good thing...
> and went on to the next suggestion:

which was:
> 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...

He replied:
> Yes, it did. the last line before the boot process hung now reads:
> 
> Initializing hardware... IDE:Gerhard storage network audio

What? <fx: looks rather more closely at the script> Oh, *that*'s what
it's doing.
> 
> Unfortunately, it still hangs at that point.
> 
<snip>
> So far that was not too complex. Thanks for trying to help. I wonder 
> what else I could try?

You might as well switch back the # IDE: it won't make much difference.

Take a look at lines 209 to 216:

> echo -n $" audio"
> 
> # Everything else (duck and cover)
> for module in $other ; do
>     load_module $module
> done
> 
> echo -n $" done"

"echo" displays things on screen. You can see the "audio" coming up, but
not the "done". (They're using pretty massive indirection here, which
is what's getting me confused).

So can you put something like
echo "other is $other"
at about line 209. And take a look at what else is being loaded.

Actually, you might try just commenting out lines 212 to 214: depending
on exactly what is in $other, you'll probably lose some functionality,
but you might get further.

Failing that, around there you can put
echo "got here"
lines pretty well where you want. See if you can tell exactly which line
causes the boot script to fail.

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | "It was all in the back of the car, and it was stolen."
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | "... They stole your car?"
                      | "No no no, just the back of the car ... I could only
                      | drive halfway home." -- I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue