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One of my friends is trying to run a Minecraft server off of his old Dell PowerEdge server and wanted to get rid of Windows Server 2003 in favor of Arch Linux.
After he burned a CD he was able to get to the initial menu. After clicking the button to boot the 32-bit version of Arch it initially runs well, but it always freezes after displaying the message "Asking for cache data failed". I don't believe this is a fatal error as I have the same message appear on my laptop. In addition, it displays a message about a problem with the timer which when researched I learned that it concerns a bug in the BIOS which the kernel had to work around. my first thought was that ACPI may have been the problem (it has been in the past) so I had him boot the cd with the acpi=off kernel parameter, but to no avail.
Here is a screenshot of what happens when he boots with no kernel parameters: http://imgur.com/ia6nUDX. He freezes at exactly the same point, minus the timer error when he boots with noapic.
Thanks in advance.
Last edited by petrusd987 (2014-02-14 03:44:01)
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The asking for cache data crap is regarding the USB. It is normal as a flash stick is a pretty simple piece of hardware, so it is just telling you what is up.
It appears though that the boot process is not making it out of the initramfs. So it is not really getting too far into the process. If you wait for a while, does it eventually fail and drop you into a recovery shell?
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There is likely some piece of hardware that causes trouble, I assume. When booting, you should select the 32 bit version, but press Tab instead of Enter. You can then edit the command line and add 'loglevel=7' to it. After that, the output on the screen will be much more informative, hopefully.
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The asking for cache data crap is regarding the USB. It is normal as a flash stick is a pretty simple piece of hardware, so it is just telling you what is up.
It appears though that the boot process is not making it out of the initramfs. So it is not really getting too far into the process. If you wait for a while, does it eventually fail and drop you into a recovery shell?
I had him run it for an hour or so but with no such luck. :-(
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There is likely some piece of hardware that causes trouble, I assume. When booting, you should select the 32 bit version, but press Tab instead of Enter. You can then edit the command line and add 'loglevel=7' to it. After that, the output on the screen will be much more informative, hopefully.
Thank you so much for this! I was unaware that that parameter existed for the Linux kernel. Is there any way for him to save the output to a storage device so he can send it to me, or is there no way for the kernel to do that?
Update: Ok, so I've run this and below is the two last lines it outputs before it freezes:
sr0: scsI3-mmc drive: 48x/48x writer cdrw xa/form2 cdda tray
cdrom: uniform CD-ROM driver Revision 3.20
Could it be a CD drive driver problem?
Last edited by petrusd987 (2014-02-13 18:52:48)
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Hey guys, I just wanted to let you know that the CD drive was the issue and now everything is running perfectly. Thanks for the help.
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Nice. Don't forget to mark your thread as [Solved]. This can be done by editing the first post.
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Ok, thanks for everything!
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