3.1 problem on 1st boot after install

[jiminid]

... and then the progress bar stops just after it's started to show - and nothing happens. I've left for quite a while... and there's nothing going on - it's just hung.

I have a similiar problem. The live cd works fine, installs fine. After editing my menu.lst in pclos mint shows up on the grub list and I select it. The mint grub shows up and after choosing the default top option I go to the cool loading page but it freezes. Select the second option, (recovery) and I get all the text pages and then it freezes right after listing scsi drives(which I don't have). Any ideas out there?

I'm running a celeron 3.2 ghz w/1.2 GB of ram, sis 661 gx-m7 motherboard, 661 gx northbridge, 964L southbridge chipset, a geforce 6200 256 mb video card, integrated ac97 sound, 1 cdrw & 1 dvdrw opticals, 1 80 gb (windows) (hd0) and 1 320 gb (linux) (hd1) hard drives. swap on (hd1,0) pclos / on (hd1,1), Mepis / on (hd1,2) Extended partition on (hd1,3) including pclos home on (hd1,4), mepis home on (hd1,5), Freespire 2.0 on (hd1,6) and mint / on (hd1,7), mint home on (hd1,8 ).

Thanks for your help!

[jiminid]

Pleased to meet you!

Glad I'm not the only one with problem - although I'm sorry we're both being cheated out of a pleasant linux experience!

And you also,
though it appears that there are too many of us and not enough gurus in this forum. I suppose we can sit around the campfire and wring our hands. However, the mepis forum talks about ubuntu's prob with the intel 965 chipset.(that's what I have) and no ubuntu or ubuntu variant since Drake has worked on this machine. Maybe your foxconn has the same chipset? If that's the case, either google your mainboard + linux and see what's out there, or check the mepis forum. Unfortunately, none of their suggestions worked for me, which is too bad as I would like to play around with Mint. However, now that mepis is Debian based, I have hope for that distro, anyway. Maybe the gutsy Mint will fix this.
I would appreciate it if you would post back with any fixes you find and I'll do the same. I have the feeling that this is a hardware vs kernel problem and will only be fixed(if at all) with a kernel upgrade that addresses it.

Hey out there, have a minty fresh type here in need!

Thanks for your help...

[T J Tulley]

Hi rebecca232a and Jiminid:

If you look at my 2 mails [Celena Installed! currently near the top in the Newbies' forum, you may be interested. Not quite your experiences, but I think relevant.

I'm still waiting for a guru - they usually are pretty quick for Newbies. and very helpful.

[jiminid]

Hi rebecca232a and Jiminid:

If you look at my 2 mails [Celena Installed! currently near the top in the Newbies' forum, you may be interested. Not quite your experiences, but I think relevant.

I'm still waiting for a guru - they usually are pretty quick for Newbies. and very helpful.

Thanks for your response,TJ, I can only hope that someone who lives far from noobieland will jump in here and lend a hand. As I said above, I think it's a kernel problem, at least with my machine, as you appear to have at least gotten booted into the desktop. Im going to reinstall and see if that does anything. Besides give an example of my favorite definition of insanity, that is...

[Forestarius]

The initial screen comes up after Grub has started the operating system... and then the progress bar stops just after it's started to show - and nothing happens. I've left for quite a while... and there's nothing going on - it's just hung.

This happened to me last night. The problem is only the boot files/screen installed, not the file system. In my case something went wrong with the partitioning and everything except the /boot partition was deleted.

If you can, search the hard drive with the Mint Live CD to see if you have partitions and a file system installed.

[nick]

Hi
Can you remove "quite splash" and see where it stops booting please?

Remove quite splash

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/7197


Also a bit here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-451536.html

Nick

[jiminid]

Here's a thought...

Mint 3.1 fails to boot when it's installed on the hard disk... but it runs fine as a live disk.

If this is a kernel problem... haw in hell can it be? The kernel is working fine from the LiveCD - and having no trouble with the chipset. It can't be a kernel problem of anything else to do with the PC's hardware as it all comes alive from the LiveCD!

I knew there was something screwy about this - just didn't realise what until today!

If there's a guru with a good explanation of how the same kernel can work from a LiveCD and not from an HDD install......... let me know...... As Mr. Spock said... 'Fascinating!'

So what are the differences? live cd runs in ram and installed runs off the harddrive but won't boot up? this mama's chile is corn fused. problem with Hal? when prebooting it goes thru several pages of text and then halts right after it tries to detect 4 lines of scsi hard drives? like I said above , I don't have any scsi drives just ide. I will attempt to copy down exactly what it says and repost. still think it has something to do with my 964L intel chipset...

Thanks,

[jiminid]

Hi
Can you remove "quite splash" and see where it stops booting please?

Hi Nick,
Heres what I get when I remove just "quiet" couple pages of text whizzing by then the splash comes up (very nice) and hangs: underneath in a window is:
Loading essential drivers... ok
Running /scripts/init-premount... ok
Mounting root file system...
Running /scripts/local-top ok
Waiting for root file system...

And hangs. after ctrl esc get black screen with busy box...can't access tty... (initramfs)

Ok, heres the really weird part, I reboot, take out quiet and splash and it halts again after a few pages at the "attached scsi removable disk sda, sdb, generic sgo type o, sg1" etc list I noted above in my earlier post. This time I wait and eventually it says Done underneath. then I get:

Check root=bootarg cat /proc/cmdline
or missing modules, devices. cat /proc/modules ls dev
Alert! /dev/sdb8 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

Then it goes to the famous busybox again.

Now, I know that sdb8 exists because I went there to get the mint grub info to copy into my pclos menu.lst which looks like this:

title Linux Mint 3.1 Celena
root (hd1,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-15-generic root=/dev/sdb8 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-15-generic
boot

I also have partitioned and formatted about a million linux systems over the past couple of years and I know how to do that as well even when the installer hides the grub installation under advanced:). But I obviously can't program my way out of a paper busybox...

Any and all help would be appreciated.

(edit) btw, installed ubuntu gutsy (7.10) and mepis 7.0 beta 5(based on debian) both installed and work just fine-neither feisty, edgy or the mepis based on them worked at all or in mepis' case worked initially but not after updates. Last ubuntu to work easily was Dapper. mmmm. Please upgrade Mint to Gutsy...Pretty Please?

[nick]

Hi

Sorry, makes no sense to me either.

Google "Loading essential drivers... ok
Running /scripts/init-premount... ok
Mounting root file system...
Running /scripts/local-top ok
Waiting for root file system... "

Comes up with:

"Boot hangs with "Waiting for root file system" since kernel 2.6.20-14"

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/106260

One person fixed it ,
"For some reason I never thought to try adding noapic to the boot parameters"

Baffled - Nick

[jiminid]

Hi

Sorry, makes no sense to me either.

Google "Loading essential drivers... ok
Running /scripts/init-premount... ok
Mounting root file system...
Running /scripts/local-top ok
Waiting for root file system... "

Comes up with:

"Boot hangs with "Waiting for root file system" since kernel 2.6.20-14"

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/106260

One person fixed it ,
"For some reason I never thought to try adding noapic to the boot parameters"

Baffled - Nick

Thanks, Nick.
I will try the noapic trick, but I dont have a laptop nor do I have a sata drive. and now gutsy is giving me the old standby fsck problem just like edgy and feisty did...oddly enough, pclos & zenwalk work fine (always) is it a debian thing? I keep trying to get mint to work...well we'll see.

(edit) noapic doesn't work. (sigh)

[Lolo Uila]

rebecca232a,

It really makes no sense that Cassandra would work and Celena wouldn't because they are the same base OS with a few different default packages. The usual response to something like this is to say your Celena CD might not be as functional as you think, and suggest you verify the MD5 checksum and burn it again at a lower speed.

On the other hand, if Cassandra works you should probably just keep using it. There is really no compelling reason to switch to Celena. It's just Cassandra with some stuff not installed by default (like update manager and Beagle), a few new things (which can be added to Cassandra) and some new artwork.

http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5490

Hope you get things sorted out.

Aloha, Tim

[jiminid]

Thank god for Daryna,

So far, works perfectly! The first Mint to do so! This is a Beta? Great job everybody. I'll check in to the beta thread with any problems or concerns I might have. I'm on it right now and everything seems to be working. The mintupdate is pretty cool, too.

Thanks again, everybody. Cya on the flip side.

btw, gutsy still doesn't work on my sys but daryna does, go figure. must be all that minty freshness!