Re: Dell OptiPlex 745 reboot problem -- BIOS update went poorly


-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Bjørn Tore Sund <bjorn.sund@xxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Community assistance, encouragement, and advice for using
Fedora. <fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx <fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Dell OptiPlex 745 reboot problem
Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:21:46 +0200

Tony Molloy wrote:
On Friday 05 September 2008 16:05:04 Mike McCarty wrote:
Tony Molloy wrote:
Hi,

I've just installed Fedora-9 on a lab of Dell OptiPlex 745 (SFF)
machines. ( only in 1 lab TG )

After running firstboot when I went to reboot the machines they just hang
and I had to do a hard reboot. I thought this was a minor glitch and
ignored it.

Now however when the machines boot into Fedora-9 the "reboot" and
"suspend" buttons do not work. The windowing system just shuts down and I
get a text prompt and the machines just hang there.

Hang? That's a vague term. If you type on the keyboard, do characters
get echoed? If you have a text prompt, then can you not do a


Hang means exactly what it means. The machines just go dead!!! No input from
the keyboard accepted. Only thing to do is a hard reboot.

Got tons of Dell Optiplex 7XX, had that exact problem. Solution is
two-step:
1. Flash up the bios. The ones they're shipped with suck bigtime.
2. Add the kernel parameter "reboot=bios" to all kernel lines in
/boot/grub/menu.lst

Solved it for us.

-BT

Ugh, I was having the same problem with my 745. So, I drug out a USB
floppy and applied the latest BIOS -- going from 2.3.1 to 2.6.2 from
Dell. Whoops.

Starting up looks fine, all services showed OK. Gets to local, X starts
and the box freezes at the spinning dots with a frozen mouse. Can't
break with Ctrl-Alt-Del or Ctrl-Backspace.

Hard power, restart, interactive init. Allow all, but skip local. X
starts fine.

rc.local contains:


#!/bin/sh
#
# This script will be executed *after* all the other init scripts.
# You can put your own initialization stuff in here if you don't
# want to do the full Sys V style init stuff.

touch /var/lock/subsys/local


Reset BIOS to defaults for kicks, no change. I have a PCI Express
graphics card, ATI x1300 installed.


Any ideas? I guess I can revert BIOS one by one backward to see if it
works.

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