[PlanetCCRMA] My boots get hung :P

[Luis Garrido]

Hi!

There happen strange things when booting my kernel, what some hackers call 
"kernelgeist"... XP

The core kernel works like a charm, but  edge kernels exhibit  in my machine 
a somehow whimsical behaviour.

After grub loads the kernel and this gets uncompressed, three different 
things may happen:

- The machine hangs (no soft reset possible). This happens most of the 
times.
- The machine boots normally. This is not usual, but happens sometimes.
- The machine enters a kind of step-by-step mode, where repeated keystrokes 
make the boot process go on. This only happened a couple of times.

My PC is an IBM Thinkpad 600X, P-III 500.

The last messages I get before the boot process hangs are (not literally):

- Kernel uncompressed and continues to load.
- ACPI disabled because BIOS is too old.
- audit.

I tried different combinations of "acpi=off" and "noapic" boot parameters, 
with no success.

What surprises me the most is that I cannot isolate the circumstances under 
which the kernel will boot or not. I think there's a certain tendency to get 
successful boots when the computer has been some hours off, which makes me 
suspect of some temperature issue. But this observation does not always 
remain consistent.

Fortunately I can safely rely on the core kernel :)

Any similar experience? Any hint?

Thanks a lot,

Luis