FC13 Freezes on boot up screen

[Scientifik]

I'm a bit of a Linux novice but have taken the plunge and got a old Dell machine set up with Fedora 13, it works fine for the most part... if I can get it to boot. Whenever I start it up the tri-color boot bars go across the screen but seem to freeze at various times. Sometimes right as its getting started, other times it will go all the way across but never actually do anything. I can sometimes get it to work if I get into GRUB and try a different kernel version. Is there anyway to pull up a more informative boot screen or some other way of figuring out whats causing the freeze instead of just watching the progress bar?

[Scientifik]

*bump* Anyone? Is there no way to troubleshoot start up freezing on Fedora?

[meine]

when the progress bars show up please press [esc] and tell us the last phrase your Dell seems to hang on. this way we can figure out where the trouble might be...

BTW I tried an old Dell Lattitude to run on Linux. it seems kinda hard. Ubuntu 5.x crawls, Fedora 7 takes ages to boot -- ages is like 3 hours reaching the balloons, CentOS 4 just the same. googeling on the Dell and Linux comes up with really low hardware specs and some modern things that just won't run on a Dell. i'd just think you should know this...

[Scientifik]

Thanks, NOW it looks like we're getting somewhere. I hit 'esc', get a loop of the following error


ata2.00: status: { DRDY DRQ }
ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
ata2.00: BMDMA stat 0x24
ata2.00: failed command READ DMA
ata2.00 cmd c8 /*blah blah memory address */
Emaxk 0x2 (HSM Violation)

it loops that ~8 times

then starts displaying the startup procedure, gets down about 8 [ OK ]'s

and dies right about here :
/dev/mapper/vg_homelinux-lv_home .....

It this a bad hdd issue?

---------- Post added at 08:54 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:47 PM ----------

Also strangely enough when I Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart, I get the System Reboot NOW! alert and a few processes getting kiled (rcS main, ck-log-systemrestart, rc main process keyboard, system start)

[Marcuccio]

Hi,
if you prefer a text only boot you should modify grub.conf by this way:

1) comment out the "hiddenmenu" line
2) comment out the "splashimage" line
3) set a timeout value greater then 0
4) remove from the kernel line the "rhgb" and "quiet" parameter

You will obtain al full text boot, without any useless progress bar or special effects

Marco

[jpollard]

Originally Posted by Scientifik

Thanks, NOW it looks like we're getting somewhere. I hit 'esc', get a loop of the following error


ata2.00: status: { DRDY DRQ }
ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
ata2.00: BMDMA stat 0x24
ata2.00: failed command READ DMA
ata2.00 cmd c8 /*blah blah memory address */
Emaxk 0x2 (HSM Violation)

it loops that ~8 times

then starts displaying the startup procedure, gets down about 8 [ OK ]'s

and dies right about here :
/dev/mapper/vg_homelinux-lv_home .....

It this a bad hdd issue?

---------- Post added at 08:54 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:47 PM ----------

Also strangely enough when I Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart, I get the System Reboot NOW! alert and a few processes getting kiled (rcS main, ck-log-systemrestart, rc main process keyboard, system start)

It sounds like your disk drive is failing.

That is a normal attempt to shutdown (which is emulating a reboot request).