Hope these ideas are some use. On 27 October 2011 13:06, Brian May <brian@microcomaustralia.com.au> wrote:
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
Sounds like it loaded it eventually? Does ifconfig eth0 show it is up?
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.
Obvious question - but perhaps not relevant - do you have any networking file system mounts? If the network taking a while to start or not loading is the issue? cat /etc/fstab
Any ideas? How can I find out what is causing the hang?
You should be able to boot in non-graphically mode and get the console output showing the steps. e.g. Does you boot load have a "quiet" or "rgb" or something telling it to do a graphical boot which hides these steps? Perhaps detailing your booting system grub, grub2, lilo et cetera and configuration file ... can allow suggestions
Is there anyway of creating another virtual console within recovery mode?
Don't know what recovery mode is perhaps it is single user mode? Perhaps you can try to switch to another virtual console after the graphics have started (before it has hung?) You can try switching to multiuser mode via telinit - e.g. telinit 2 or telinit 3 and see if you can see what is failing. Andrew