Hello,
I have a permanent serious problem.
5 times out of 10 my system does not boot on my laptop. It stops at the beginning of my boot screen - ant that is it, freezes. Then I have to turn off my laptop - and try boot again.
It happens that I have to do that 3 or 4 times until it starts booting normally.
I have reinstalled my system (for various other reasons) two times, but the problem persists on fresh install as well. I am using 11.1 kde 4.1 64 bit on HP Pavilion6000 laptop.
Thank you.
What do you mean by boot screen? Is this after you’ve selected openSUSE on the grub menu?
If yes, does it also freeze if you select ‘failsafe’?
Yes, I select to boot Opensuse, not failsafe, and then it freezes like in a screenshot, but at the beginning (white horizontal stick does not move from beginning).
http://screenshots.linuxcenter.kz/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=286&g2_serialNumber=3
I have never chosen failsafe. Even if I did - it would not mean I would notice a problem. - sometimes it happens that I can boot my suse without any problems 5 or 6 times…
First suggestion is to backup menu.lst. In a terminal;
su -
cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst.bak
Then change the boot to verbose, so we can hopefully see the problem. You’re using KDE so;
kdesu kwrite /boot/grub/menu.lst
You should be able to find a section near the bottom corresponding to a normal openSUSE boot. It will say splash=silent somewhere in it. Change it to splash=verbose.
Try rebooting a few times, and see if there are any errors. When it hangs, try pressing ctrl / alt / f1 through to f7. If there are any errors, write them down.
The reason I asked if you’d tried failsafe, is if you can boot failsafe ten times in a row without it hanging, then it’s a fair bet that the problem lies in the difference between failsafe and normal. Sounds like ACPI - I don’t know how to fix it, but somebody will hopefully…
i did a backup.
but i could not open menu.lst with any program, any text editor I have. it says “menu.lst cannot be read”.
about acpi: I read somewhere in a forum that adding option acpi=off to boot loader should solve the problem. I i did that. It could be that it has solved the problem coz after booting a few times nothing freezed…
But the option created many more, including extremely choppy sound, so I changed it back. (thanks god, I do not need to reboot many times when I finally get system on)
Maybe it is a problem in ‘menu.lst’ file? (sorry if question is silly, I am pretty new here). thanks
If you did not manage to get to edit grub options, just try adding splash=verbose in the line visible before starting to boot.
Still curious that you can not open the grub file. Did you try to open / list the backup copy you made?
ghostintheruins’ suggestion makes sense. Or maybe try;
su -
kwrite /boot/grub/menu.lst
Instead of the kdesu. You could use vi if you really needed to, but it’s a pain…
Turning acpi off on a laptop will cause trouble. On my laptop turning acpi off makes the laptop useless. Sound is crap, wifi drops off and on.
Sudden freezes are mostly caused by failing memory. Install memtest and run that.
thanks for your replies.
It seems I have managed to fix it. I ran a sytem repair from DVD.
I was told that problems were found in bootloader, when a new one was installed (twice! (i dont know why, it just told me about the problem twice and installed bootloader twice)), at least for now computer loads ok.
I have rebooted many times, turned off, even tried to hibernate - laptop wakes up.
Thanks again for you advices. (still cannot read the menu.lst file though).
BTw, it is interesting how this happened, because I have checked intallation DVD - no problems were found. And yet - maybe I will have to do that after each kernel update… we’ll see.
That’s good news, but still troubling that you can’t read menu.lst - you won’t get far in linux without being to edit that.
Did you do an md5sum AND a burned media check before you installed? If not, I’d seriously consider trying again from scratch - because things don’t appear as they should, and you’re only storing up problems.
If you’ve done all that, try
sudo cat /boot/grub/menu.lst
If that won’t work, something really odd is happening.
When your “green screen” freezes, press escape “Esc” and see what is actually happening behind the scenes. It does not freeze, it is unable to proceed a specific method. See what that method is and report it here. It could be loading a module(even though that could be omitted by default).
Next time, just simply press “Esc” and see what causes the problem. It is recommended that you get rid of the “green loading screen” so that way looking at what’s being loaded at what time, at such a rate(every time you boot) you may learn something :).
Hey come on, the average user cannot make sense of the boot messages.
And a real freeze (kernel panic) would immediately block all access, incl. Esc. And what if he’s on one of those netbooks with SSD? No reading at all, it’s too fast (from GRUB to login in 18 secs now). For your information: everything is shown in /var/log/boot.msg as well.
ok,
su -
kwrite /boot/grub/menu.lst
does nothing. typing sudo cat /boot/grub/menu.lst gave me this:
# Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Mon Mar 30 21:07:26 EEST 2009
default 0
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd0,5)/boot/message
##YaST - activate
###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title SUSE LINUX
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST9100824AS_5PL1RVBS-part6 repair=1 resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST9100824AS_5PL1RVBS-part5 splash=silent showopts vga=0x317
initrd /boot/initrd
###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe -- SUSE LINUX
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST9100824AS_5PL1RVBS-part6 showopts ide=nodma apm=off noresume edd=off powersaved=off nohz=off highres=off processor.max_cstate=1 x11failsafe vga=0x317
initrd /boot/initrd
I cannot say I understand anything in there, so thanks for your help 
no I did not did any md5 media check. I used torrent to download ISO, then - burned it on windows xp (previous system), using that dvd ever since when system asks (eg, installing sth).
And yes - next time it freezes - I will press esc (not sure if I did that, could it be I have pressed esc one of these times, but nothing happened?).
P.S. it takes about 2 mins for opensuse to boot. (I am not sure, but it seems suse was faster even on much older mashines (my sister uses one, older laptop, about 700mb ram, 1.4Hz laptop). Mine is hp pavilion, 64 bit, two core amd, 1gb ram…). ← these thoughts came to me, when I started thinking I might be storing problems…
Thank you again,
Viktoras
sorry, but I got infected with a thought I might be storing up problems. Maybe it has nothing to do with boot problem, here is sth strange:
I went to sysinfo and saw this:
Processor (CPU): AMD Turion™ 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-50
Speed: 1 600,00 MHz
Cores: 2
Temperature: 51°C
but after one second it changes to this:
Processor (CPU): AMD Turion™ 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-50
Speed: 800,00 MHz
Cores: 2
Temperature: 51°C
It is supposed to be 1600MHz, as I understand.
Yet again, sorry for spaming if it has nothing to with my boot problem.
Ok, it’s good that it works anyway.
A tip - in one of your previous posts, you said it says it ‘can’t read the file’, and in this last post you’ve said nothing happens when you try… These descriptions aren’t that, well… descriptive. 
You’re likely to get much better answers if you report precisely what happens - as in “I type the commands, hit return, it pauses a second, then prints “Cannot open file X: permission denied.” and drops me back to a prompt.”
If you’ve downloaded by torrent, that theoretically checks the hashes as it downloads - like an inbuilt md5. You said in your second to last post that you’ve checked the DVD - did you mean you did a media check? If you have, then everything’s fine with that. If not, it’s worth a go (if there even is one on the DVD any more… I’m not sure, but it’ll be in the boot menu if it is there).
I’m still really confused about this though. You’re definitely running KDE right? Does
su -
gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
do anything?
ETA (response to second post): It’s hard to spam your own thread - don’t worry.
Many laptop systems use ‘on demand’ cpu throttling, and will change the core speed according to system load - I’d strongly suspect that’s just that. Don’t panic about the storing up problems comment - all I’m really saying is this looks odd. If you find more problems, start to suspect a broken install, and start again from scratch, rather than playing ‘whackamole’ trying to fix them all.
ok, i’ll try to be more presice:
so when do this:
su -
kwrite /boot/grub/menu.lst
terminal freezes in a way, not a line comes afterwards, it does not return the “power” to me. It reacts when I press buttons on keyboard, I can write text in terminal, but not as cammands, but as… text. so I call it - “freezes in a way” :). I have to close it and open again if I want to write commands.
**
(kwrite tells me it cannot read it when I manually go to folder and try open it. I cannot open .lst files anywhere, in any folder)**
I am using KDE 4.1.3, default for opensuse. So perhaps that is why typing gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst as root gives me this:
The program 'gedit' can be found in following packages:
* gedit path: /usr/bin/gedit, repository: zypp (openSUSE 11.1-0) ]
* gedit path: /usr/bin/gedit, repository: zypp (repo-oss) ]
Try installing with: sudo zypper install gedit
bash: gedit: command not found
I did the “media check” before repairing boot loader. That was the first time I have checked my opensuse dvd. No errors were found.
Confuseling, thanks for replies.
Ok. Try opening a terminal;
cd ~
kwrite test
?
ETA: Or even try opening kwrite from your kicker menu…
running test tells me this, i’ll translate (its my language, lithuanian, not english)
kwrite starts, I can use it. I can read txt files
Ok. Something’s definitely amiss here, and I’m afraid I don’t know how to fix it at all. The only other thing I can possibly suggest is to create a new user using YaST user manager, and log in using that username, then try the same
cd ~
kwrite test
Then maybe you’ll have identified whether the problem is with your original user account’s permissions, which might help someone shed some light on this.
Good luck - I hope you fix it.
thanks Confuseling, indeed.