I am trying to upgrade the SUSE on my laptop from 10.3 to 11.0. The 10.3 distribution works fine and I was able to install it last year without any problems.
Now, I have installed 11.0 (on a separate partition) and when I boot 11.0, it runs through the boot sequence fine until at some point, quite suddenly a hard reboot occurs. If I reboot using the DVD and enter the rescue mode I can read /var/log/boot.msg and see that the last line is:
Starting HAL daemon
Has anyone ever run into a similar problem? Any ideas what could be going wrong? Is it safe to remove the HAL daemon?
It’s the daemon liGNUx uses to talk to your hardware, so I doubt you could just remove it. Obviously something has changed in the hardware recognition between versions. Or maybe you had v10.3 running with specific kernel parameters? If so, try using the same kernel options when running 11.0 (just edit your menu.lst accordingly; the stanzas for the old v10.3 kernel are still there, I hope?).
There are also the boot options to disable acpi, apic, etc., during installation. One of these will probably allow the installation to proceed. You could search for their exact sintax (noapic, acpi=off, or something like that) and try one option at a time.
Well, that did the trick. In the grub menu the only difference between the 10.3 and 11.0 kernel lines was that the option “vga=0x314” was missing on the 11.0 line. When I put that option in, the boot sequence runs to completion and all is well. – I guess I will pretend I understand why that should be and move on…
If I reboot using the DVD and enter the rescue mode I can read /var/log/boot.msg and see that the last line is: