While booting my computer hangs several times at various places, and it’ll sit there until I hit a key. It seems that any key will jump start the process. I’ve restarted 3 times and it has hung a different number of times in different places each time. After it boots everything looks fine and the boot log doesn’t show anything that that would be fatal. I’m currently downloading the kernel source to compile a custom kernel, but I wanted to see if anyone had ran into this type of boot behavior before.
I have the same problem: safe boot starts ok but standard boot 11.1 is not starting until I press Esc key (not any key). I have to repeat it several times until it completes booting.
I upgraded from 11.0 and it has first started normally. Later, I installed nvidia driver with yast.
I am confused about the messy behaviour at booting because after that everything looks alright (monitor res, wifi link, nfs client, etc).
Can anybody help me?
These do not sound like the same problem - actually, these kinds of behaviors usually are due to entirely unrelated issues.
@cbroyles - drop the bootsplash screen by hitting the Escape key to see what the kernel is doing and possibly where/why it is slowing down where it is.
@lurrutxua - open /boot/grub/menu.lst as root and print/write down what you see on the kernel line of the failsafe boot stanza (e.g., acpi=off, etc.). Then reboot and back at the grub menu, highlight the standard selection, and in the Boot Options below type the first of the kernel arguments you copied. If that works, you know this is what the kernel needs each time (and if you wish, you can investigate what that means). Repeat this with each of the arguments, one at a time, until you isolate which one it is that you need to use. If this doesn’t work, I suggest you start your own thread.
I fixed the problem, but I really don’t know how. I added my custom kernel to the GRUB menu and booted it up. It booted up fine and didn’t hang at all. I forgot to add support for a couple of things and my network didn’t work so I rebooted into the default kernel to do some research and figure out what I did wrong. When I booted the default kernel, it didn’t hang. It booted up in 15 or so seconds to my gnome desktop without any poking or prodding. The only thing I can come up with is that when I added my custom kernel to GRUB that the system must have edited other parts of the config as well. I didn’t take notice of what the default kernel options where before I changed it, but here is a copy of what is sais now and you can compare it to yours and see if there is any difference.
append=repair=1 resume=<myresumeimage> splash=verbose showopts image=<mybootimage> initrd=<myinitimage> root=<myrootdevice> vgamode=0x317
I’ve shortened everything inside the <> to a description instead of the actual files because they’ll be different for everyone.
Congratulations - a great, brave solution. Other than something different in the initrd, I don’t see from the above where there would be a difference. Did you use the openSUSE config file to compile your kernel?
Yes, I copied it strait out of the /boot partition. I’ve been using linux since 1997 and SUSE 11.0 was the first distro I had ever used that I didn’t have to compile a custom kernel for some reason or another. I just wish I knew what exactly I changed to get the weird boot behavior for 11.1 to stop. I didn’t change anything in the setup of the default kernel that I am aware of and it doesn’t hang anymore either. I think your probably right about the initrd. Oh well, it works so I’m not going to complain. Thanks for your help!
Strange, indeed. And, thanks for the thanks, but of course I didn’t offer anything useful 
I had the same problem on my HP Pavilion. Failsafe, on the other hand, boots without any problems. It turned out that nosmp does the trick so after I added it to the list of kernel parameters, everything works fine. Hope this will help other people as well.
fwiw, IIRC, nosmp disables symmetrical multi-processing, i.e., makes the default smp kernel a uniprocessor kernel instead. Sometimes this works instead:
pci=nomsi