CDROM Boot Hangs But Only Under 6.x

[Tim Daneliuk]

Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
<SNIP>


> 
> If your MB is new it should work.  Older MB's have problems with
> the "new way" to boot off an optical cd.  You can try BIOS/CMOS
> updates from the motherbard mfg if they are available.  Sometimes
> even back-flashing to older BIOS fixes it.

This is a brand new ABIT mobo w/latest bios on board.

> 
>> 3) Reordering/removing memory sticks made no difference.  I am running
>>     a memory test ATM just to be sure, but so far, the memory seems fine.
>>
>> 4) No amount of poking around in the BIOS settings seems to help either.
>>
>> I am starting to suspect the MOBO.  If I stick a couple of cards in the
>> two available PCI slots, the system has trouble taking me into the BIOS
>> screen.  I have to remove the cards to reliably get into the BIOS
>> settings menu.  I wonder if this is one of those situations where there
>> are not enough IRQs to go around.
>>
> 
> If it's a new MB the PCI cards are probably too old/slow to work right.

I thought that even modern PCI busses would fall back to the old
speeds.  I've had not trouble with any of my other rather new
mobos, running, say, old Adaptec controllers.

> 
> Another thing to check is if the MB has any overclock settings turned
> on, these will screw up booting, going into BIOS, and some PCI cards.
> Go to BIOS and select "reset to factory settings" which turns off all
> the go-fast stuff.  And make sure you confirm the CPU speed in BIOS
> with the actual speed stamped on the CPU.

I've reset the BIOS to the most conservative mode, no overclocking, etc.

> 
> Sometimes you just got to stick a floppy disk drive on the thing and
> boot from the 4 boot floppies then do an FTP install.  I have about
> a dozen servers among the collection I manage that are like this - 
> some are even newer ones.

I would *love* to know just where boot is getting lost.  In the case
of your servers, do you see the same symptoms I am seeing: The
kernel loading progress prompt gets painted (most of the time,
sometimes it does not even make it that far) and the booting
seizes up?

Thanks for your time,
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Daneliuk     tundra at tundraware.com
PGP Key:         http://www.tundraware.com/PGP/