FC1 Boot locks up

[BillLee]

I have recently installed FC1 dualboot on an HP Pavilion laptop. After much travail, I was successful in getting grub as the bootloader, it will allow me to boot XP as well as FC1.

However, when I start the FC1 boot it eventually hangs and locks the machine up tight as a drum: the ONLY key that works is the power-off key!

Here is the disk layout (partitioning done withPartitionMagic under XP):

C: 38gb NTFS holding XP
SWAP 500mb
/ 38gb ext3

When I attempt to boot FC1, the boot process gets into the stage

"Setting up local disks"

for about 10 seconds and then the system just hangs. It will not respond to the keyboard or mouse, the little rotating graphic on the boot screen stops.....nothing. During that 10+/- seconds, the progress icon is spinning, there is considerable disk activity.

Running linux rescue and then chroot /mnt/sysimage, I am able to look into the FC1 installation. Here is what the fstab looks like:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5swap swap defaults 0 0

Does anybody have a pointer to help me determine the problem? Are there some log files somewhere that might shed some light on what's going on?

Does the FC1 boot need to know about the existance of the NTFS partition that holds XP?

Thanks.

Bill Lee

[BillLee]

A reply to my own message:

PROGRESS!

I was able to turn off the graphical boot interface by removing the "rhgb" from the kernel" line in the grub.conf file.

Now: the messages I see tell me that the boot is hanging up immedaitely after issuing the message:

"Initializing firewire controller (ohci1394):"

This occurs in a sequence of "things" that all produce the

"[ OK ]"

responses, starting with "Configuring kernel parameters:" and ending just before the firewire line with "Enabling swap space:"

All of these occur before the "Enter I for interactive startup" is honored (which is at rc initialization, I think).

Now the next thing to find is where this sequence is controlled and see if I can determine why the firewire initialization is killing things.

---------------------------------
UPDATE:

Adding "nofirewire" to the "kernel" line on grub.conf disabled the firewire booting sequence and I was SUCCESSFULLY ABLE TO BOOT FC1!!!!

Thanks to all who helped, perhaps these long-winded posts will help the next person.
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Regards,

Billl Lee