Description of problem: My system will hang just before the gdm login screen. I have a Dell 700m Inspiron with Intel 855 Video card. The laptop will boot fine once, but the second boot will lock up, then boot fine the next time. Over and over like this. I read in a Fedora bug report that this may be related to haldaemon. So I did chkconfig --del haldaemon. This solved the problem but of course the system does not detect any USB devices. Another weired thing is that if I boot in runlevel 1 and then do init 5, things seem to go OK! The system did not hang when I did this a few times. But I have not done a thorough test to confirm this behavior. By the way this behavior is producable with 2.6.9-11.EL as well. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): hal-0.4.2-1.EL4. The above problem started manifesting itself after I upgraded to "Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 (Nahant Update 2)". All was working OK prior to this upgrade. The kernel version is: 2.6.9-22.EL How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot the system with haldaemon enabled, and system locks up at the login prompt. 2. Reboot, and the system will start normally. 3. Disable haldaemon, and all is fine, except for the detection of USB memory devices. Actual results: System hangs at the login prompt every other re/boot. Expected results: System should boot normally with haldaemon enabled Additional info:
I noticed someone else having the same issue with this laptop, which indicated that if they used the internal network interface (wired), the problem goes away. I was only using the 802.11g interface and had disabled the eht0 (ONBOOT=no). Once I changed that setting to 'yes', (ONBOOT=yes), eventhough there was no physical connection, everything started working, that is with haldaemon enabled. Apparently this has something to do with the b44 (broadcom ehternet chip) driver. The interesting thing is that this problem manifested itself once I updated to EL4 update 2! So I consider this issue resolved for now.
issue is resolved. closing.