F10 hang on boot with Core 2 Duo E8500/Asus P5Q-EM

[hotdog]

I've just done a 'small upgrade' to my home PC (well, OK, I've replaced everything apart from the drives, the monitor and a few assorted USB peripherals... ) and I'm now unable to boot.

When I let it try to boot from the HDDs it hangs with a blank screen almost immediately. I then tried booting from the install DVD in rescue mode, when I try that it hangs at "Booting processor 1/1 ip 6000". I ran Memtest86 from the install DVD an got a few odd errors, but they went away after I reseated the RAM while hangs on boot are just the same. I also tried upgrading the BIOS to the latest version but that made no difference either. It doesn't seem like a hardware fault, as far as I can tell from within the BIOS setup software all the hardware is OK. Anyone have any ideas?

The system s based on an Asus P5Q-EM motherboard (G45 chipset), with Core 2 Duo E8500 CPU and 4GB DDR2 RAM (a Corsair Dominator twin-pack). There are also two SATA HDDs in there, and DVD-RW drive and a 3.5" FDD (yes, really...). The HDD's contain a F10 x86_64 installation which was up to date a month or so ago when the PSU on the previous incarnation of my PC started playing up (so, not quite the latest kernel but not very old either), whereas the install DVD I've also tried to boot from is a standard F10 x86_64 DVD and so has a rather old kernel.

Edit: For what it's worth, this is what I get on screen when I try to boot in rescue mode from the DVD. It just hangs indefinitely after printing that last line, no error beeps from the BIOS.

SLUB: Genslabs=13, HWAlign=64, Order=0-3, MinObjects=0, CPUs=4, Nodes=1
Calibrating delay loop (skipped), value calculated using timer frequency.. 6332
59 BogoMIPS (lpj=3166299)
Security Framework initialized
SELinux:  Initializing.
Dentry cashe hash table entries: 524288 (order: 10, 4194304 bytes)
Inode-cache hash table entries: 262144 (order: 9, 2097152 bytes)
Mount-cache has table entries: 256
Initializing cgroup subsys ns
Initializing cgroup subsys cpuacct
Initializing cgroup subsys devices
CPU: L1 I cache: 32K, L1 D cache: 32K
CPU: L2 cache: 614K
CPU 0/0 -> Node 0
CPU: Physical Processor ID: 0
CPU: Processor Core ID: 0
CPU0: Thermal monitoring enabled (TM2)
using mwait in idel threads.
ACPI: Core revision 20080609
..TIMER: vector=0x30 apic1=0 pin1=2 apic2=-1 pin2=-1
CPU0: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU      E8500 @ 3.16GHz stepping 0a
Using local APIC timer interrupts.
Detected 20.830 MHz APIC timer.
Booting processor 1/1 ip 6000

[SlowJet]

I recently went through a similar experience.
I my case the Auas p5q-? that uses the DDR3 memory has a bug in the board.
The board was downgraded to a board like yours (older) with ddr2.
It has a new 1TB green WDC disk SATA II.
Last I saw of it, it was running Windows, playing music, and Slient Running.
So it works great.

I can only suggest 3 things.

1. Recheck the bios for the raid vs. CH stuff (on, off)
2. Are the drives SATA I and the new PSU have SATA II connectors? You'll need a converter.
3. Download and try the latest SystemRescue live CD from Distrowatch.
If it boots then you will know it is not CPU, board, memory which leaves disk.
If it can't find the partitions then you know it is the dives.

If it can find the drives, try to mount and chroot into yousystem.
From there I would re-install/update to the latest mkinitrd from koji, kernel, kernel-firmware and whatever else you can think of once your inside.

Then reboot and start up with grub kernel line parms
1. get ride of rhgb quite
2. enforcing=0 nomodesetting 3

g/l

SJ

[hotdog]

Thanks for the suggestions SlowJet. I'm at work at the moment so I can't try anything until I get home, but a few comments:

1. I think by BIOS settings for the drives should be OK, there's a choice for which mode to run the SATA controller in, IDE, RAID or AHCI. I've tried both AHCI and IDE, no luck either way.

2. The drives are powered up OK, they're spinning up and the BIOS is seeing them and reporting their status as OK. They're both SATA II.

I'd really don't think it's a drive issue, I can get as far as the GRUB menu when booting from the HDD so the BIOS at least is able to find the boot partition to get GRUB running. Also when I'm booting from the install DVD it's hanging well before it's doing anything with the HDDs. It looks more like a problem with the CPU or motherboard chipset (both are rather new models, though a bit of searching suggests people do have F10 running with both).

3. I'd already decided to download the Fedora 11 preview release Live CD and see if I have any luck with that. Thanks for the suggestion of the System Rescue Live CD, I'd not heard of it before but I'll give that a go too. Hopefully at least one of those will enable me to boot the system.

[hotdog]

Hmmmm, still no joy. I've tried the System Rescue live CD and it hangs at exactly the same point every time. I've tried both of the x86_64 kernels, the default one (recent vanilla-ish) and the alternative one (Fedora based), and also a host of kernel options including noapic, apci=off and irqpool. Doesn't make any difference. DOS applications (e.g. memtest+, aida) run fine, but I seem to be completely unable to get a linux kernel to boot on this thing.

Could this be a hardware fault? I really don't know, and I don't know what to do next. I don't have another LGA775 motherboard based PC so I can't try swapping CPUs/motherboards/memory modules around to work out exactly which component of the system is causing the trouble. I know there are people out there with linux running on this model motherboard, and with this model CPU, so I should be able to at least boot.

[d-con]

I'm having the same problem with the p5q-em and Fedora 11. Did you ever solve this?

I think it's the g45. not sure. After the install from dvd, reboot, nothing on the screen, not even text. Just a blank screen after the bios is done.

I just tried updating to the latest bios to see if it makes a difference. I'm trying the install again.

I've tried disabling the secondary IDE controller and with the SATA controller in AHCI and Compatible/IDE mode.

In my case, I brought over a known working CPU, memory, hard drive and optical drive from another system. I decided to replace my old (working) motherboard because I screwed up the network part of the i/o panel, and the cable wasn't making a good connection. I guess I should have just bought a $20 network card.

-David

[d-con]

I don't know what I did, but the F11 live dvd worked, and I was able to install from the live dvd.

Then I went back and reinstalled the entire wad from the regular X86_64 DVD and that worked. Very odd.

FWIW, I left the extra IDE controller disabled, and the sata controller is in AHCI mode.

-David