FC5 Post Installation Hang

djheath · #1 28th April 2006, 05:23 PM

After what appears to be a successful installation, rebooting brings me to:

Red Hat nash version 5.0.32 starting

and then nothing happens. I don't even know how to go about troubleshooting this problem... any help would be highly appreciated.

Specs on the box:
IBM M-Series, dual Xeon 2.4, 1GB RAM, Maxtor ATA & IBM SCSI disks. Nvidia Quadro Pro XGL (dual digital input card)

I've swapped drives, changed BIOS dirve order, removed drives, reformatted using both auto partitioning as well as manual with and without LVM on both ATA & SCSI disks with not one different result. I've run memtest86 with not a single hiccup. What else is there to be done? I had been running Red Hat 9 quite happily until eWeek lured me in to FC5 by stating that their upgrade from RH9 to FC5 went without a problem.

Thanks in advance!

tashirosgt · #2 29th April 2006, 05:32 AM

If you are getting the grub screen (or can get to /boot/grub/grub.conf by using the 1st FC5 cd in the rescue mode) then you can try adding various options to the boot line. There are options such as "lowres" "nousb" etc. Dog-One wrote a summary of these options in: http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=25826
Use the advanced search feature of the forum to find what options are working with FC5. (The advanced search works much better than the plain vanilla search.) You might try adding an option fo boot with a uniprocessor kernel, if such an option exists.

djheath · #3 1st May 2006, 01:28 AM

update:

after creating a matrix of the (seemingly) most popular kernel command-line options, and then subsequently testing them i've pretty much isolated the problem down to what really has to be the video (nvidia Quadro4 Pro XGL) (via various kernel command-lnie options)

turns out that i needed to go somewhere last night and returned 6 hours later and lo and behold the box was at the graphicl login screen. i logged in and the video was painfully slow.

again, this is doing a plain-jane FC5 install... one other weird thing... i couldn't modify any files on disk (everything was read-only.)

any suggestions?

djheath · #4 1st May 2006, 10:26 PM

The hang happens right after SELinux loading... never does get to INIT. Is there a way to remove SELinux from the install? Thanks

Seve · #5 1st May 2006, 11:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by djheath

The hang happens right after SELinux loading... never does get to INIT. Is there a way to remove SELinux from the install? Thanks

Hello:
During the install process you can choose not to enable SeLinux? Or once you have booted to FC5 then you can choose to disable it?
There is a command that will allow you to turn it off during the boot process, which is setenforce 0. You can read more about Selinux here:http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/releas...ecuritySELinux

Seve

djheath · #6 2nd May 2006, 12:04 AM

thanks for the docs... but now that selinux is disabled INIT terms early, there's no hostname and the harddrive is read-only. where do i find what is happening to INIT? Thanks.

tashirosgt · #7 2nd May 2006, 03:59 AM

This is so wierd that I would run memtest86 on RAM, from the Fedora install cd. If your system passes, perhaps you can boot from the cd in the rescue mode and find the logs from your successful boot in the /var/log directory. (For example, /var/log/messages or one of the older messages.x logs if the last boot was aborted. ) See if the logs show anything. /var/log/Xorg.0.log , /var/log/gcm/0:log or 1:log etc.

djheath · #8 2nd May 2006, 06:09 AM

memtest86 passes all tests.

during boot-up, i modify the default kernel options and remove 'rhgb quiet'... everything seems to load fine but right after SELinux loads it just hangs there but when i do ctrl-alt-del, it reports 'md: stopping all md devices' and reboots.

of merit is the fact that it's hanging irrespective of installing on ATA or SCSI.

So here's the summary:
FC5 hangs before INIT
FC4 won't load my aic7xxx driver but will install on the ATA drive
RHEL4 freezes when trying to load the aic7xxx driver

this problem is beating me into submission!!!

tashirosgt · #9 2nd May 2006, 03:16 PM

In your attempts with kernel options, did you try "lowres" or "vga=391"?

fah · #10 8th May 2006, 05:47 PM

it is only a guess... i have an older pc with a resident aha 7xxx and it had some problems installing on a UDMA ATA-133 ide adapter card HDD win me, because even though the (unused) scsi adapter was turned off in bios it found it and hung (had to manually disable it in syst control in safe mode.. win xp had not really a problem, but DOS boot also hung, until i set (by flashing) the ide (RAID) adapter s BIOS to ATAPI (nonRAID or pass thru) mode.
FC4 never had a problem, nor did FC5, but then have u tried disabling the SCSI adapter to see how it copes booting ?