Won't boot on battery! Often locks going TO battery.

English Hardware
#1

I have a Compaq 6820s, which is a Intel dual-core laptop with an ATI Radeon Mobile X1300 and 2GB of ram.

I was running 10.2 x86 without too many problems.

I installed a new hard drive and loaded up 11.1 x86-64 on it.
For the most part, it runs well, as long as I am on AC power.

If I try to boot on battery, however, it never gets to the greeter, locking up on a black screen shortly after selecting the OS from grub. (the screen is ON, as the backlight is active, just no image)

And 50% of the time the system will lock up hard with a distorted display if I disconnect the AC power while running.

Any ideas?

#2

OK, I figured it out or, at least, I seem to have corrected the problem by adding “nohz=off” to the kernel line in the menu.1st

Here’s an excerpt from my menu.1st:

title openSUSE 11.1 - 2.6.27.7-9
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.27.7-9-default root=/dev/sda3 resume=/dev/sda1 splash=silent showopts vga=0x317 nohz=off
initrd /initrd-2.6.27.7-9-default