From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030701 Description of problem: System: Gateway Profile 2, Intel BP810 MB, 64MB memory, 6.8GB Quantum CX Drive. I installed from redhat 9 iso's and the installation went fine. Before partitioning the installer complained about incorrectly reading the partion table, but that it was usually safe to ignore this warning and continue. I partioned my drive into boot, swap, and root partitions and the installation completed. Upon booting the system the grub loader came up and I hit enter on 'Redhat Linux' it would get to right after the 'apm' line in the kernel and then hang. I tried _a_dding various kernel boot params (disabling all the obvious stuff, apm, etc) with no success (same failure). I booted up with 'linux rescue' from the cd. 'Skip'ped system detection and manually mounted the system partition and chroot'ed it. Mounted the boot partition, renamed lilo.conf.anaconda to lilo.conf in etc and ran lilo. Rebooted system and now the system boots all the way and my redhat 9 system is up and running. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): grub-0.93-4 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: See Description. Actual Results: See Description. Expected Results: System should have booted all the way with grub. Additional info: I checked out /proc/ide/*/geometry and it looks like linux sees the correct physical geomtry. I don't know if the logical geometry is correct though. I just really thought it was weird that the kernel only booted part way. Normally its all or nothing or atleast a panic or something. I enabled that nmi_debug param (i think thats what its called) but didn't get any feed back.
Does adding 'apm=off' help?
Assuming all I need to do is type 'a' at the grub menu and add the params to the existing list of params (ro, and root) then no, it doesn't help. It doesn't seem to hang on the 'apm' kernel message it seems to hang right after the 'apm' kernel message. I tried a whole bunch of different combinations. Even if I do a 'apm=off' it will still show the kernel message right? Its just strange that it works with lilo and not grub, that almost seems like a grub issue to me, but if that was the case you wouldn't think it would beable to boot at all since it reads the kernel directly from the boot partion (so it must beable to find the drive)
By some miracle I encountered this issue with friends system just this evening. He didn't have his keyboard hooked up and it locked in the exact same position during the kernel boot (right after the APM message line). His was a dell system P3-9xx MHz (don't know the model number). The Difference is that I _had_ a keyboard hooked up, BUT its a usb keyboard (the gateway profile boxes don't support ps2). It is almost like the kernel/grub didn't like the fact that we didn't have "hardware"/ps2 mice hooked up when booting. Hopefully this helps identify this as a known problem.
This sounds like a BIOS fault. Either way, with no activity in more than a year, I'm going to close this bug. If it pops up again with a more current distro, feel free to open a new bug.