I have a Gateway 9100 laptop which is happily running linux except
for one problem. About 5 times out of 6 when it reboots and lilo goes to
start linux I get a spontaneous reboot after the:
LILO boot:
Loading......
lines (i.e. I never get the "uncompressing vmlinuz" )
Now if this always happened I'd at least know something really big was
broken, but if you let it sit there rebooting itself for a minute or two
it will eventually get to the uncompressing vmlinuz stage and from then on
it works great!
I havn't noticed any difference between cold and warm boots and the time
it takees varies from working on the first boot to about 10-15 reboots
before working. I have tried kernels 2.0.31 to 2.0.34pre11b and they are
all the same. I have tried compiling the kernel without APM bios enabling
and that didn't change anything. I don't think it is an option which is
causing the problems because it reboots way before the main kernel even
starts.
Now I worked out that the completion of "Loading linux....." means that
./arch/i386/boot/entry.S has completed and the kernel is at
0x10000 and control is transfered to setup.S which tests a whole bunch of
bios stuff and then finishes loading. However, I'm not good enought at
x86 assembler to figure out how to add debugging in there to figure out
WHERE it reboots itself so I'm looking for ideas.
To make it more interesting, it appears that on those times when it fails
and reboots the CD-ROM light comes on (like something is probing/initing
the cdrom drive) and those times it succeeds that does not happen. So my
guess is somehow some of those initial bios calls are 'sometimes'
triggering the wrong device (cdrom on IDE bus 1 instead of hard drive 1 on
IDE bus 0).
The machine dual boots winNT which doesn't exhibit any boot problems so it
is difficult to get help from Gateway tech support, but if I could
document exactly what bios ops were failing they might have to accept
that.
Thanks for any help you all can give me,
Jonathan
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Jonathan R. Stanton jonathan@cs.jhu.edu
Dept. of Computer Science Finger for PGP key
Johns Hopkins University
PGP: 13 EE B7 5D 3B F9 5E 9C 41 30 AA 78 30 54 59 D0
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