[WBEL-users] Strange behaviour when booting

[Matthew Hodgett]

I hate to say this, but on every occasion I have encountered something
like this it has been hardware, usually the power supply from what you
are describing. I did have a box that had ongoing boot problems, once it
got going it was fine, but is was the hard disk that was going faulty
which caused that one.

Even recently I had problems with WBEL starting. I could install the OS,
I could rescue the thing, I could do all sorts, but not complete a
regular boot. It turned out to be the processor.


Matthew
Manager, Information Systems
 


-----Original Message-----
From: whitebox-users-admin@beau.org
[mailto:whitebox-users-admin@beau.org] On Behalf Of Benedikt Carda
Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2004 2:32 PM
To: whitebox-users@beau.org
Subject: [WBEL-users] Strange behaviour when booting


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


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