[WBEL-users] Strange behaviour when booting

[Benedikt Carda]

Dear all,

since a week or two my WBEL system does not boot correctly anymore. It 
seems to be something that only happens to me, as nobody else was 
posting anything similiar. What happens is that the system starts to 
boot but at a certain stage the screen gets black and it starts again 
from the very beginning (counting the RAM). Then is starts again booting 
and gets a little bit further in the booting process but again screen 
gets black and it starts again. Next time the same thing: It starts to 
boot and again it is able to boot a little longer but again screen black 
and new attempt.

This happens around four to five times, after that it boots up correctly 
and the system runs without any problem the whole day (it is my desktop 
linux system so I turn it off at the end of the day and start it in the 
morning). As it works perfectly after it finally successfully booted, I 
doubt that it is any hardware error. If I had a problem with RAM or 
something, it would also be there when already succeeded booting but 
here, this strange behaviour only exists while booting.

Stages at which the system "likes" (but not always does - as I said 
before, after some attempts, I succeed in booting) to get black screen 
and start new:
* Freeing unused kernel memory
* INIT changes runlevel
* starting XFS

(There may be others too, but these where the once I noticed it goes 
down again very often.)

The boot.log does not say anything as most times this happens before the 
stage where syslogd starts.
Maybe interesting to note is that it is a box where I changed from RHEL 
to WBEL adopting the procedure found herein:
http://beau.org/pipermail/whitebox-users/2004-November/004437.html

Furthermore, it makes no difference which of the installed kernel 
versions I use. It happens with the newest as well as with older kernels 
too.

Does anybody have an idea?

Thanks in advance.

Best Regards,
Benedikt Carda