Arch Linux

Laurent

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2009-02-07

Posts: 36

[SOLVED] Installation went well, but pc hangs at boot

Hi people

After using only Linux for already a year, I decided to give Arch a try.
I like the minimalistic approach of Arch very well, it's wiki is very good documented and it's a pleasure to have a system you can tweak that much.

I printed out the installation wiki and the LVM-RAID installation wiki, because I wanted to use raid1 and LVM.
I followed it step by step, my raid setup went well, either did my LVM. So nothing could go wrong, I thought.
Grub came on, it booted, but after 3 seconds it stopped, no message, it just stopped.
I tought, maybe I selected to many packages and went there someting wrong.
I installed it the second time,  but now with only the extra packages I really needed instead of all packages available.
Then I misspelled a line in grub and it wouldn't boot.
The third time I did everything just like the wiki's told me to do (like the first- and second time), but again, after three seconds, it just stops, without a message of failure, nothing.

Does anybody have an idea what evil destroyed my Arch?
I think it must be someting very stupid, but I just don't see it.

It stops with this last two lines:

usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid
drivers/hid/usbhid/hid-core.c: v2.6: USB HID core driver

(If my English is bad, it's my fault, but it could be worse, couldn't it? )

EDIT: sorry, I didn't see there was an installation corner, my fault! (Someone who is permitted to dislocate my post, please do it )

EDIT2: Great news, when I install Arch without software raid nor LVM, it boots increadible fast!
Now I'm going to try to install it with software raid, but without LVM, good luck to me.

EDIT3: marked thread as solved

Last edited by Laurent (2009-02-08 22:06:15)

Laurent

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2009-02-07

Posts: 36

Re: [SOLVED] Installation went well, but pc hangs at boot

I think I go mad...

After spending more than 5h for installing it without LVM, only software raid, it wont boot either and again it stops without a errormessage, the last two lines are the same ...

usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid
drivers/hid/usbhid/hid-core.c: v2.6: USB HID core driver

Something strange I saw come back every time (just on top of my screen, I coudn't see more because I can't scroll between bootmessages)

If /dev/md4 gets created while you are here,
try adding rootdelay=8 to your kernel line

What is that?

Every comment would be very helpfull, thank you very much.

Leigh

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2004-06-25

Posts: 533

Re: [SOLVED] Installation went well, but pc hangs at boot

Sometimes the system will try to boot before everything has loaded, so by dding rootdelay=8 to the kernel line in your /boot/grub/menu.lst will delay boot by 8 seconds to ensure everything finishes loading.

I'm not sure if this will help you, but I use to have a software raid setup a long time ago and had a lot of trouble booting. I added pci=conf1 to my kernel line aswell. It solved my problems.

here's my kernel line as an example...
kernel /vmlinuz26-leigh pci=conf1 rootfstype=ext3 root=/dev/sda3 rootflags=data=journal ro vga=773

you can ignore the rootflags=data=journal. it's a ext3 optimization. And rootfstype=ext3 is if you use ext3 as your filesystem.

---

-- archlinux 是一个极好的 linux。

Laurent

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2009-02-07

Posts: 36

Re: [SOLVED] Installation went well, but pc hangs at boot

Thank you for your comment

I already tried it with rootdelay=8, without effect, but maybe, with that pci-ting added...

Thank god someone invented livecd's

Laurent

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2009-02-07

Posts: 36

Re: [SOLVED] Installation went well, but pc hangs at boot

I discovered some interesting things...

1.
Nano automatically adds a line break, you must be aware to delete them, otherwise Grub reads not everything

2.
I can not manualy mount /dev/md4 (which contains my root), it is very strange, I can mount /dev/md3 with reiserfs, I can mount /dev/md5 with jfs, but I can't mount /dev/md4 with jfs and it is not an extended partition because it is refered to /dev/sda6 and /dev/sdb6

I think rootfstype=jfs and pci=conf1 did the trick, or maybe that I discovered the Nano-breaks...

Someone who knows how to mount /dev/md4?
This doesn't work:

modprobe raid1
mdadm --assemble /dev/md4 /dev/sda6 /dev/sdb6
mount -t jfs /dev/md4 /mnt

But with any other partition it works...

The solution:
Just don't use a '4' as partition number  (because extended partitions have number 4) and grub seems to like ext3 more than jfs for root
and use rootfstype=ext3, pci=conf1 isn't necessary
Also be aware of Nano who automatically breaks lines

It's remarkable how easy it is to install Arch and I'm totaly addicted to pacman

Last edited by Laurent (2009-02-08 22:05:06)