Intel S3000AH stall on boot

[Antony Mawer]

On 3/12/2007 1:37 PM, Tim Daneliuk wrote:
> Jack Vogel wrote:
>> On Dec 1, 2007 8:32 PM, Daniel O'Connor <doconnor at gsoft.com.au> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> I am doing some work for a company that recently bought 2 systems based
>>> on the above motherboard and mostly they work fine, however on boot
>>> just before userland starts they stall for about a minute. (Just after
>>> it starts the second CPU).
>>
>> Did you happen to check if during that time the floppy disk is being 
>> accessed?
>> If it is just reconfig the kernel with that device out and the hang
>> won't happen.
>>
>> That is the only hang that I've seen that lasts that long.
>>
>> Jack
> 
> 
> Or you can just turn it off in the BIOS to avoid having to fiddle with the
> kernel.  *Why* this is happening is of more interest to me.  ISTM that
> the kernel startup logic should be able to detect a floppy drive with no
> disk in it and move on promptly.  I believe this because that is exactly
> what 4.x did ... well, now that I think about it, I never tried 4.x on
> the Intel MOBO that is causing this aggravation here....

Another "me too". We saw this and wound up removing the floppy drive 
from the systems in order to avoid this lengthy delay on boot - we 
weren't using them anyway and it saved a whole $5 or so on the hardware 
costs... ;-)

I seem to recall it was not purely a 6.x thing - as I'm sure that we 
have plenty of 6.x machines with FDDs that don't exhibit this hang - but 
it was only newer Intel motherboards (I think 9xx series onwards) that 
we were seeing the issue on...

--Antony