Woody
woody@localline.com
"Give me a dozen atom smashers, an underground laboratory, and a girl in a
diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who
writes the nations laws!"
On Wed, 22 Apr 1998, Jonathan Stanton wrote:
> Hi,
>
> 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
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> 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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