Bug 767508

Summary: Freeze at boot during "Loading Initial Ram Disk"
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Lionel Dricot <ploum>
Component: kernelAssignee: Peter Jones <pjones>
Status: CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: unspecified Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 16CC: dennis, gansalmon, itamar, jonathan, kernel-maint, madhu.chinakonda, nekohayo, pjones
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i686   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2012-01-04 15:09:10 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Flags
grub.cfg none

Description Lionel Dricot 2011-12-14 09:16:43 UTC 
Description of problem:

When I boot, 5 times out 6, the boot freezes on "Loading Initial Ram Disk". I have to shutdown and restart multiple times every morning. Also, only kernel3.1.0-7.fc16.i686 is bootable (and 1 times out of 6). I never succeeded to boot on any newer kernel.

Note : I didn't touched anything on the grub.cfg. This is a Fedora 16 installed on a freshly formatted ext4 partition. (the /home partition is older but should not interfer).

The only thing I've touched on / is to add a xorg.conf to support my trackball. Everything else was done by yum update.

As you can see, the grub.cfg is actually quite messy, with some false echo statements.


How reproducible:

Every morning ;-)


Additional info:

I'm using a Lenovo X201 with a SSD disk. There's no other system than Fedora on this laptop.
Comment 1 Lionel Dricot 2011-12-14 09:18:10 UTC 
Created attachment 546631 [details]
grub.cfg
Comment 2 Lionel Dricot 2011-12-22 15:51:21 UTC 
Switching to kernel as none of the newer kernels seems able to boot, despite re-creating the Grub config multiple times.
Comment 3 Dave Jones 2011-12-22 21:43:55 UTC 
if the kernel only loads one time out of six, that sounds like a hardware fault of some kind.  I'd start with a memtest86 run.
Comment 4 Lionel Dricot 2011-12-22 23:02:18 UTC 
This whole week, I've been counting exactly how many times it fails. 

The result is the following:

It *never* works for any kernel 3.1.4 or 3.1.5. Never.

It works most of the time with kernel 3.0.7 (for 15 tries, it failed twice).
Also, it appeared with the first 3.1.X kernel upgrade (never had the problem before).


My 1 out of 6 was a wrong estimation because I was trying multiple kernels.

This is why I reported this bug against the kernel and why I highly doubt it is hardware related (except if 3.1 reveal some hardware bugs).

I will nevertheless follow your advice and run a memtest86.


PS: since I started used Fedora, I've a few errors displayed before the plymouth theme (EHCI something). It seems unrelated because I always had those errors but I should put them for completeness. Where can I find the complete kernel log?
Comment 5 Lionel Dricot 2012-01-04 15:09:10 UTC 
The bug was fixed by my upgrade to 3.1.6-1

There was well a problem with the kernel but I cannot reproduce it anymore now.

Good thing :-)