Zan Lynx wrote:
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.
Unfortunately, I added this to elilo.conf (see attach), ran elilo, and
rebooted... And the behavior is the same. If I had thought about it I
wouldn't have expected it to work anyway, since when the system is
unpingable as well when it stops outputting text, even after a few
minutes (I guess it's possible the kernel blocks waiting for the serial
console, but that seems unlikely) ... Maybe it's time to start poking
in the BIOS...
Thanks again for the ideas so far... Any others?
Thanks,
Brian
--
Brian Szymanski
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