Re: [SLE] Fwd: OpenSUSE 10.0 hangs at boot (from time to time - not always)

Hi Carl,

Thank you for your patience and time up to now!
I have to admit, you almost got me to start thinking about hardware.
Nevertheless I would like to give a short update on what I did during the last
days and some thoughts about your comments...

> Even if the system were only 1 month old, it could still be the memory, the
> PSU or a flaky drive. You have to focus on the symptoms.

Right, I agree. What drives me nuts and leads me to my interpretation (->
Software-issue) is, that the system was running fine with 9.3 (for almost 5
months) and the problems started RIGHT AWAY with the update to 10.0. On that
specific day of the upgrade with nothing done to the hardware.

> I thought it also locked up when you attempted disk to disk large file
> transfers?

No. I can not remember having said that. Anyway - it is not true. The problem
occurs ONLY while booting. Regardles of whether I do a cold boot or reboot.
Either is randomly affected. But if (big IF here) the system "survives" the
boot, it runs stable and flawless for hours even with heavy load. I have been
playing Open GL-Games, burning DVDs, copying GB of data from one internal
disk to another. Some of these activities have been carried out in parallel.
No issues.

> Each device with built-in logic and a controller has it's own
> capabilities and requirements for successfully initializing. If one detects
> insufficient voltage immediately after power-on (fails it's internal
> POST) it can reset itself many times over until the problem it is
> detecting has passed.
> The question is, does it sometimes take too long and cause the device
> (or the whole sequence) to error out?

OK, but shouldn't that have happened under 9.3 as well? I do not think, that
9.3 and 10.0 are THAT different here. Except for preloading of course. See
next comment.

>10.0 uses a preloading technique that is designed to dramatically reduce
>boot times. When booting directly to run level 5, I suspect your primary
>system drive is undertaking a sustained high bandwidth transfer rate...

I have deactivated the init-scripts boot.earlypreload and boot.preload quite a
while ago. I assume that this reduces system load during startup. And I
assume that the hardware-load is then somewhat comparable between SUSE 9.3
and 10.0? And that under normal circumstances everything that worked under
9.3 should also work under 10.0? (from a hardware-load and power-supply point
of view)...

>one that is lasting long enough to freeze the system in *exactly the
>same way* that it is freezing when you test large file disk to disk
>transfers.

But (!) the system does not freeze with large file disk2disk transfers.
Thats what makes me wonder...

What I did in the meantime:
I edited the /etc/init.d-Script of KDE and added some startup-requirements so
that "insserv kdm" puts the script to the very end of the startup-process. I
can see on console 1 that KDM is the last service to be started.

I changed the system parameter "RUN_PARALLEL" to "no" to make sure, all
modules are loaded one after another.... seems to work. At least the system
waits for NFS-Client to timeout, if the NFS server is offline. With this
parameter set to "yes" the system continued starting modules and KDE, while
NFS tried to import the remote filesystems from fstab...

The bad thing is: It dind't have any effect...

> so, I have to put on my thinking cap and do some reading and research.
> It's pretty late at the moment, so I'll try to catch up with you
> sometime tomorrow.

I am still hoping for your support. Thank you again for all the time you
spent!
As I mentioned above I am just about to start playing around with hardware
even though not fully convinced. The only reason is, that another system
installed from the very same DVD works fine. Of course there is a slightly
different hardware with therefore other drivers used and no NFS client, no
ATI driver, other BIOS...

But what is still true for my machine: With the absolutely same hardware 9.3
did work great for months, Win XP still does and 10.0 had startup problems
beginning with the exact day of installation.

Kind regards,
A still confused Martin

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