opensuse 12.2 System hangs at boot time : Loading initial ramdisk then hangs.

English Install/Boot/Login
1

opensuse 12.2 x86_64 fresh install

System hangs at boot time : Loading initial ramdisk then hangs.

any idea ?

2

Well video is always a possible problem. You can press F3 and have a few selections on the install disk OR, after installed, you can press the ‘e’ key for edit and then try adding in the kernel command nomodeset? I have a blog on adding in a 3 to go to run level 3, but imagine you instead entered nomodeset instead.

How to Start openSUSE 12.2 with Grub 2 into Run Level 3 - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

In the mean time, tell us more about your PC and in particular, about its video being used. Have you ever tried an openSUSE LiveCD before? Often, downloading and making a LiveCD, which you then boot from, can help in determining if openSUSE is going to work for you or not.

Thank You,

3

Same problem here, will load after about a twenty minute wait. Changed the bootloader to grub from grub2, loaded a few times ok, but is now taking a long time again. Will reinstall with grub and write/load from MBR. May be a compatibility problem the my new Samsung SSD 830 drive. What is you setup? Mine Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P motherboard with 4 Gb of RAM, Gigabyte nVidia Geforce 9800 GT, and the Samsung 830 SSD.

Matt

4

I would consider using the kernel load option nomodeset command with the nVIDIA video card and anyone with nVIDIA should take a look at these two blogs:

Installing the nVIDIA Video Driver the Hard Way - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

AND

LNVHW - Load NVIDIA (driver the) Hard Way from runlevel 3 - Version 1.46 - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

Thank You,

5

Will give it a try, going back to Grub did not help. Stops here now for twenty minutes :" initrd /boot/inittrd-3.4.6-2.10-desktop
[Linux-initrd @ox370C800, 0xf274fe bytes]". I was using the open source NV driver, then I waited twenty minutes and installed the nVidia binary driver, same problem. I believe has something to do with the Samsung 830 SSD and the Linux ACHI driver… I changed the BIOS from ACHI to IDE, but it didn’t help. Another fact: after about 15 minutes I get: “doing fast boot” - “Creating device nodes with udev”
Then 5 minutes later the desktop loads.

Matt

6

Jd,
nomodeset, did not help. I put my old Raptor hard drive running SUSE 11.4 back into the computer (media player PC) and every thing is working fine and PC boots in @ one minute. Tried installing 12.2 on old Raptor hard drive and had the same problem, which was a surprise, I guest the new SamSung 830 SSD is not the problem… I noticed when installing 12.2 the setup stops a very long time at “Search for Linux Partitions”…like 6 minutes…something is going on with the SATA/ACHI driver and this motherboard chipset…will download and try the Live-DVD…Matt

7

Did you check the install medium before installing?

8

Yes, checked out fine. Just downloaded the 12.2 live-CD. Boots fine; will partition, format, and copy data to the hard as a test. Then try an install from the Live-CD.
Matt

9

Ok, this has became the upgrade from hell. I have finally got my media PC working with 12.2, “kind of”. After playing with the Live-CD to verify everything was ok with the PC and the Samsung 830 SSD, I did an install from the Live-CD. Everything worked fine, PC reboot in less than a minute. Play with it for a little while, rebooted several times with no problems, and then I did a on-line update. PC rebooted with no output to my Plasma monitor via the HDMI interface. Connected a VGA monitor to the VGA output and got garbage on the screen. Got another session going and login as root as the screen was readable under this session, added the nVidia Repositories and installed nVidia drivers. Rebooted the PC and all was good with the HDMI video. Powered the PC off a few things to verify all was well. Now an hour later and more reboots, it randomly freezes at “Loading initial ramdisk” as before, BUT NOW it loads the desktop after about five minutes when it freezes. I will live with the five minute wait; got other things I need to be doing. Will look into the problem next week and note my findings here.

Thanks, Matt
Gigabyte Tech, GA-MA790XT- UD4P, 3X AMD Phenom II 370Se, with 4Gb Critical RAM
Samsung 830 SSD, and Gigabyte Geforce 9800 GT fanless Video card (GV-N98TSL-1GI).

10

Ok, it has been a week with no booting issues. I have rebooted a few times each day and have not seen the slow booting issue again.
I don’t know what caused the issue nor what fixed it. I have done all the updates, maybe one them fixed it, I don’t know.
So, install from the live-cd and install all the updates is the all advice I can offer at this time.

Thanks, Matt
Gigabyte Tech, GA-MA790XT- UD4P, 3X AMD Phenom II 370Se, with 4Gb Critical RAM
Samsung 830 SSD, and Gigabyte Geforce 9800 GT fanless Video card (GV-N98TSL-1GI).

11

Hi
Thanks for your suggestions , I have tried with boot option nomodeset and I have also installed original NVIDIA driver with no success.
Every 3rd re/boot ends in system hanging on after loading initial ramdisk.

It also hangs sometime in booting failsafe mode in the grub2 menu.

The Graphics is a 2 years old NVIDIA card. has worked fine with older opensuse versions.

12

There are few things to check to make sure the nVIDIA will/can be loaded.

  1. You must disable Kernel Mode Settings (KMS) a YaST ; System ; /etc/sysconfig Editor ; System ; Kernel ; NO_KMS_IN_INITRD=Yes (was No)
  2. Blacklist the nouveau driver (add the blacklist nouveau entry) from the file /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf as root
  3. Add it to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT kernel default load options line in your /etc/default/grub text file as root and running the terminal command “sudo /usr/sbin/grub2-mkconfig --output=/boot/grub2/grub.cfg”

Some additional resources can be found here:

SYSEdit - System File Editor - Version 1.00 - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

AND

GNU Grub2 Command Help/Config Editor - Version: 1.85 - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

Thank You,