From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041020 Firefox/0.10.1 Description of problem: After suffering a lock-up in OpenOffice I performed a hard shutdown. When I rebooted it stopped on "Kernel Perimeters" and would not continute. When I pressed "Ctrl-c" it continued to runlevel 5, but without read-write access to the disks. I could not log in to any account. The only way I knew to fix this was to reinstall Fedora Core 3. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Didn't try Additional info: I had installed nVidia drivers via RPM since kernel source is unavailable to install using nVidia's installer. My system was fully up to date at the time. Besides that I had installed several media players and internet utilities. I had the same problem under FC3 test 3.
The problem is very reproducable. Do an xorg.conf file that is broken and it will happen. I had it happen on two separate computers today. The system blinks when it tries to load X and then just hangs when sending kernel parameters. Fix xorg.conf and the system boots again as normal.
During bootup, delete parameter "rhgb" using grub editor. After boot you can use X setup utility (or utility starts automatically).
Thanks for the report. For users who are experiencing problems installing, configuring, or using the unsupported 3rd party proprietary "nvidia" video driver, Nvidia provides indirect customer support via an online web based support forum. Nvidia monitors these web forums for commonly reported problems and passes them on to Nvidia engineers for investigation. Once they've isolated a particular problem, it is often fixed in a future video driver update. The NVNews Nvidia Linux driver forum is located at: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=14 Once you have reported this issue in the Nvidia web forums, others who may have experienced the particular problem may be able to assist. If there is a real bug occuring, Nvidia will be able to determine this, and will likely resolve the issue in a future driver update for the operating system releases that they officially support. While Red Hat does not support the proprietary nvidia driver, users requiring technical support may also find the various X.Org, XFree86, and Red Hat mailing lists helpful in finding assistance: X.Org mailing lists: http://www.freedesktop.org/XOrg/XorgMailingLists XFree86 mailing lists: http://www.xfree86.org/sos/lists.html Red Hat mailing lists: https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo Setting status to "NOTABUG" (unsupported).
While I realize that this is technically an nVidia problem, it strikes a relatively large number of users. I personally would like to see: 1) A fall-back position that recognizes a failure to initialize the rhgb, and continues in text-mode. 2) An additional entry in the GRuB menu for a 'fail-safe' text-mode boot. This would make things considerably easier for many, I know I certainly banged my head against this one for a while after my FC3 upgrade. Interestingly, this happened on only one of the two machines I upgraded, because I just happen to have been running a plain vanilla 2.6.9 kernel on one box, and had configured the nVidia drivers for that kernel... It was apparently compatible enough with the kernel on the FC3 DVD to allow function.