Hello, When I reboot my computer it hangs with a flashing cursor on a black screen. For ever. However the system hasn't crashed, it just appears to be hanging, e.g. numlock light will toggle. Ctrl+Alt+Delete also works fine. So I reboot it into safe mode, and selected mount filesystems read/write. It does this and then hangs in exactly the same way. So I reboot and enter a command line. I can remount / rewrite and mount everything else fine. I then run "dhclient eth0" and after about 60 seconds I see these messages: [ 88.014507] r8169 0000:02:00.0: eth0: unable to load firmware patch rtl_nic/rtl8168d-2.fw (-2) [ 88.021533] r8169 0000:02:00.0: eth0: link down [ 88.021586] r8169 0000:02:00.0: eth0: link down [ 88.021894] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [ 90.310097] r8169 0000:02:00.0: eth0: link up [ 90.310433] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready The firmware exists in the required location: brian@aquitard:~$ ls -l /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8168d-2.fw -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1324 2011-08-23 23:23 /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8168d-2.fw It is possible when mounting filesystems I missed an important step that is required to load the firmware properly (maybe the step that causes the hangs?). However at this point, with the network up, I can continue booting fine. Any ideas? How can I find out what is causing the hang? Is there anyway of creating another virtual console within recovery mode? Thanks -- Brian May <brian@microcomaustralia.com.au>