Hi. I just installed openSUSE 12.3. Everything seemed to go smoothly until I tried to reboot at the end for the first login. I can’t reboot, can’t enter the one-time boot menu to boot from a rescue CD, and can’t enter my BIOS setup to do anything there… So unless someone can help, I think this thing is bricked and I have to buy new hardware. Needless to say, I’m not happy at the moment. I’d really appreciate any help you can give me.
I turn on the power, get the BIOS POST screen that asks me to press different keys in order to enter BIOS setup, on-time boot menu, BIOS flashing utility, etc. I can press the keys and (depending on my choice) get acknowledgement of my choice. But before it honors that choice there’s an intermediate step. It says “Please wait. This may take a few seconds.” and I think it does some kind of hardware detection, though I’m not sure. Normally this step completes and I’m taken to whatever option I picked at the POST screen (or it boots from the hard drive if I didn’t pick anything), but now after installing 12.3 it hangs at the intermediate step, and I can’t do anything.
I can’t boot from the hard drive or CD or USB or anything else.
I can’t enter the BIOS setup or the BIOS flashing utility, or otherwise make any changes to anything at all.
It seems that any software based solutions are out… I’m wondering if there’s anything I can do to fix this?
Will removing the mobo battery for a while help? IDK what settings that preserves. Is there a jumper I can use to reset things to a working state? I’ll take any ideas here, cause I’m stumped, and I really don’t want to buy new hardware.
You’re a bit to quick to say that opensuse caused the problem. It is more likely that there was a hardware failure.
My suggestion: Carefully remove the memory cards, and then reinstall them, one at a time. When reinserting, gently wiggle in the slot to make sure that you have good contact with the connectors. Reseating memory sometimes does wonders.
It might not help, but it is unlikely to make things worse.
I might be wrong. But I think the suggestion with the RAM is to add one in and try booting. If that fails, remove it and add the other and try booting…
openSUSE has no effect on BIOS settings or access to such.
Installing an OS is a task that puts some strain on the hardware…
Try booting without the HD (this will also re-seat the connections when you add it back in)
On 2013-08-08 05:36, caf4926 wrote:
>
> I might be wrong. But I think the suggestion with the RAM is to add one
> in and try booting. If that fails, remove it and add the other and try
> booting…
>
> openSUSE has no effect on BIOS settings or access to such.
Yes and no… IF it is a UEFI machine, and the on disk tables it reads
to decide what to boot are bad, the machine could lock.
There has also been a report (here and on bugzilla) of a certain
hardware that locks when Linux install is attempted. Let me try to find
it…
Thanks for the help, but I’ve fixed the problem now, and it was 12.3 at fault, though I’m not sure exactly what the issue was.
I went through my MOBO documentation and found the jumper to clear the CMOS and used that, since it was the only thing I could think of after your suggestions didn’t work. That fixed the issue I was having. SUSE still refused to boot for a totally different reason, but at least at this point I was able to nuke it with DBAN and I’ve gone back to Kubuntu.
Before I went back though I did try resetting my BIOS settings to the way I had them before… I got the same problem again, and had to unplug everything and open it up again to reset the CMOS before nuking SUSE. My best guess is that SUSE has problems with either AHCI mode on my hard drive when I tell BIOS to enable that, or with the High Precision Even Timer being put into 64bit mode instead of 32bit as is default. I changed very little else.
Keep in mind that these BIOS settings that SUSE barfs on are the settings that have worked with Kubuntu since I got this thing, and more recently have also worked with Debian 7, Fedora 19, and Arch Linux (all 64bit, as was SUSE). So I don’t know what SUSE’s issue is, but it’s a nasty one. It’s the first ever software problem that I’ve actually had to physically open up my computer to fix.
And I still don’t know how SUSE managed to screw up my system at a point when the boot loader hadn’t even run yet because the BIOS was still doing its thing (BIOS, not UEFI as has been sugested).