grub2 upgrade multiboot, hangs inconsistently

Hi everyone,

Ok, I have been scouring the lists and the forums to try and make sure I
get this right, but something weird has come up, and I haven’t seen the
same problem.

This is on my laptop only. I did not do a clean install, but an upgrade
from 12.1 (I know this is inadvisable, but I tend to fiddle around). The
upgrade actually went pretty well, and of course it kept grub legacy.
The only thing that was hard was that when I would do “suspend to disk”
on closing the lid, when I would go to power back up, sometimes the
screen would hang and not boot up. I would end up hitting the reset button.

It never did this in 12.1, and since I have 12.1 still running on
another partition, I checked the graphics driver to see if the hang and
blank screen were due to a bad graphics driver. It was exactly the same
as on 12.2. This was the output of hwinfo --gfxcard:


09: PCI 02.0: 0300 VGA compatible controller (VGA)
[Created at pci.319]
Unique ID: _Znp.NM4Dfup9NW6
SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0
SysFS BusID: 0000:00:02.0
Hardware Class: graphics card
Model: "Intel VGA compatible controller"
Vendor: pci 0x8086 "Intel Corporation"
Device: pci 0x0126
SubVendor: pci 0x1043 "ASUSTeK Computer Inc."
SubDevice: pci 0x0116
Revision: 0x09
Driver: "i915"
Driver Modules: "drm"
Memory Range: 0xdd000000-0xdd3fffff (rw,non-prefetchable)
Memory Range: 0xc0000000-0xcfffffff (ro,non-prefetchable)
I/O Ports: 0xe000-0xe03f (rw)
IRQ: 43 (5976 events)
I/O Ports: 0x3c0-0x3df (rw)
Module Alias: "pci:v00008086d00000126sv00001043sd00000116bc03sc00i00"
Driver Info #0:
Driver Status: i915 is active
Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe i915"
Config Status: cfg=no, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown

Primary display adapter: #9

Since this is the same in 12.1 as in 12.2, and it doesn’t hang on bootup
or restore from hibernate in 12.1, this makes me think this is not a
graphics driver issue. However, I may be wrong - anyone have an idea on
that?

In any case, I decided to upgrade to grub2, seeing if the bootloader
would make a difference. I went to yast2, selected bootloader, with the
following options, as per a response in an earlier thread in the lists.
These are my settings I used:



YAST2 - Boot Loader
Boot Loader: GRUB2
Boot Loader Location:  tick Boot from Root Partition
tick Boot from Extended Partition
Boot Loader options:
tick Set active flag in Partition for Boot Parition
tick Write Generic Boot Code in MBR
tick User graphical console
Console Resolution: Autodetect by grub2
Console Theme: /boot/grub2/themes/openSUSE/theme.txt

The difference being that in mine, I have the root in an extended
partition, and so I checked that box as well.

Grub2 installed, and when I went to reboot, I got the black grub2 screen
with the menu options, etc. On boot to 12.2, the first thing that pops
up after the grub menu is this:

Loading Linux 3.4.6-2.10-desktop …
Loading initial ramdisk …

Then it hangs right there whenever I go to boot up. I have to hit the
reset button on my laptop and reboot. Sometimes I go through the cycle
of hitting the reset button 2 or 3 times before it will go past loading
the initial ramdisk. Sometimes 10 or 15 times. Sometimes not at all. If
I boot into Windows 7, and then restart, it usually does not hang after
grub.

Any ideas on what to do next? It is a pain to have to always hit the
reset button when I am booting up.


G.O.
Box #1: 12.2 | KDE 4.9.1 | AMD Phenom IIX4 | 64 | ATI Radeon HD 3300 | 16GB
Box #2: 12.2 | KDE 4.9.1 | AMD Athlon X3 | 64 | nVidia C61 GeForce
7025 | 4GB
Laptop: 12.2 | KDE 4.9.1 | Core i7-2620M | 64 | Intel HD Graphics 3000
| 8GB

You might try this
http://forums.opensuse.org/content/128-re-install-grub2-dvd-rescue.html

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Once you are chroot

I have the same problem with grub2 running OpenSuSE 14. I have tried grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg and it has no effect.

The behaviour suddenly began last week after booting fine with no problems since the install.

Any idea where to to look for the cause of the problem?

Donald

At this point it is already in kernel and past bootloader. The only thing that you could try to change in bootloader itself is disable graphical mode to see it it makes any difference (change GRUB_TERMINAL to “console” in /etc/default/grub and run “update-bootloader --refresh”). But I would say it is either hardware slowly dying or problem of this kernel version.

Since this is the same in 12.1 as in 12.2, and it doesn’t hang on bootup
or restore from hibernate in 12.1, this makes me think this is not a
graphics driver issue.

Of course it is the first think that one would suspect. 12.2 has different kernel, so it has different driver. You could try official kernel update first (12.2 has one) to see if it makes any difference.