Re: sporatic failure to boot on sgi750

[Zan Lynx <zlynx@acm.org>]

Brian Szymanski wrote:
> David Medberry wrote:
>> On Fri, 2008-08-01 at 14:21 -0400, Brian Szymanski wrote:
>>   
>>> I'm having sporatic failures to boot on an sgi750 (2x733MHz Merced)
>>> which I've recently obtained. Once the system is up, however, it's rock
>>> solid, so it doesn't seem to be a hardware problem. Also, the problem
>>> occurs whether booting from CD or booting from the hard drive. If I try
>>> to boot from the CD, the error looks like this:
>>>
>>> CD:
>>> Uncompressing Linux... done
>>> Loading file \initrd.gz... done
>>> [ flashing cursor mocks me until i reboot ]
>>>
>>> HD:
>>> Uncompressing Linux... done
>>> Loading file \EFI\debian\initrd.gz... done
>>> [ flashing cursor mocks me until i reboot ]
>>>
>>>     
>>
>> This is typical if the console is NOT where you think it was at.
>> You should see what CONSOLE= parameter is being passed in your elilo
>> config.
>>
>> I'd guess that the working config has a different CONSOLE= than those
>> that don't work. You can also just run through different answers. (In
>> addition to the serial port being wrong, the baud could also be
>> wrong--try a variety 9600 and up.)
>>   
> 
> Sorry, I wasn't clear. This is VGA output -  I'm not using a serial
> console. The problem occurs about 1/2 the time, with the same boot media
> and no other changes.
> 
> PS - I also should have said reset, not reboot, as I have to power the
> system off and on after this happens - keyboard input seems to go to
> /dev/null at this point.

I used to have a very similar problem on my Compaq DL590/64.  I fixed it
by adding "console=tty0" to the ELILO kernel argument list.  It was
doing just what David said, semi-randomly choosing between VGA and
serial console.  I have no idea why.