Arch Linux

xaw

Member

From: Chapel Hill

Registered: 2007-08-09

Posts: 177

[Kindof Solved] Toshiba Satellite A135 No BIOS screen on reboot

Hi everyone,

I have been using kernel 2.6.27 for a very long time now, and just recently, I was updating my arch install to test out the new xorg 1.6.1 and kernel 2.6.29, however I am encountering a strange problem that I've been trying to figure out for about a week now. The laptop in question is a Toshiba Satellite A135-S4727, Intel Core 1.73 GHz, Atheros 802.11g/b/a Wifi, DVD+/-RW drive, and Intel 945GM graphics. Again, I will add that this same laptop has been running arch without a hitch for the last two years.

Upon booting arch, everything works as expected on this laptop (no freezes, unexpected behavior, etc), including Suspend-to-Ram and Suspend-to-Disk. The problem that I'm encountering is that, for some odd reason, whenever I reboot the laptop using either:

$ reboot

or

$ shutdown -r now

the laptop fails to reboot into the BIOS post screen, and it also fails to reinitialize the DVD-/+RW and Hard Drive on this machine with any LED indicators, etc. Also, Windows XP or FreeBSD do not seem to have this problem on the same laptop, and they both reboot as expected on this machine. The only way to get the machine back up and running again is to hold the power button for a few seconds to turn it off the "hard" way, and then to power it back on.

On the kernel boot parameters in GRUB, I have tried multiple combinations of the following parameters

acpi_sleep=s3_bios acpi_apic_instance=2 reboot=b

Also, I have tried to disable ACPI using acpi=off to no avail as well.

My guess is, is that this is some kind of recent bug specific to my hardware in the linux kernel, but I have no idea how to go about fixing this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Last edited by xaw (2009-04-30 17:11:50)

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The water never asked for a channel, and the channel never asked for water.

xaw

Member

From: Chapel Hill

Registered: 2007-08-09

Posts: 177

Re: [Kindof Solved] Toshiba Satellite A135 No BIOS screen on reboot

Am I the only one with this issue? I have still been looking for a solution to no avail.

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The water never asked for a channel, and the channel never asked for water.

xaw

Member

From: Chapel Hill

Registered: 2007-08-09

Posts: 177

Re: [Kindof Solved] Toshiba Satellite A135 No BIOS screen on reboot

Ok, so it seems that I have made some progress in figuring out what's going on with my laptop. The first thing that I did was I disabled all non-essential kernel modules from loading upon startup, which seems to eliminate the problem. Then, I went one by one adding each one of the kernel modules back into the kernel with each successive startup and reboot cycle to find the culprit module.

From the looks of it, the madwifi modules for my Atheros AR242x card seem to be giving me the headaches of this problem, but what I don't understand is, is that how can this interrupt the reboot process when the kernel is passing the reboot signal to the BIOS for reinitialization of devices?

In any case, this problem is now kind of solved for now anyways :-/

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The water never asked for a channel, and the channel never asked for water.

sourya_s7

Member

Registered: 2009-06-11

Posts: 2

Re: [Kindof Solved] Toshiba Satellite A135 No BIOS screen on reboot

Hey....
I seem to be having the same problem,although its a Dell Inspiron 1410 instead of a Toshiba. Shutdown works but if i try to restart i end up in a black screen. I am new to archlinux and just have a 6 month experiance with ubuntu so i'm still quite a linux noob. If you've solved the problem can you please describe how'd you do it. Do i just blacklist the ath5k module? But if i do so wouldn't my wireless be disabled?

Thanks

Sourya