Scott R. Godin writes:
I'm running a seagate 250GB SATA drive as the main boot drive of the system, non-raid. The motherboard apparently has some sort of deal going that causes sata_nv to also load, but there are no ports on the motherboard for connection. I wound up installing the promise card instead to use the new hard disk:
$ lspci |grep -i promise 01:08.0 Mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC20575 (SATAII150 TX2plus) (rev 02)
dmidecode shows the motherboard Version: ASUS A7N266-VM ACPI BIOS Rev 1004/AA, and /proc/cpuinfo shows model name : AMD Athlon(TM) XP 1700+
Upgrading to the kernel-2.6.17-1.2139_FC5 release caused the system to completely fail to continue booting; I got a long string of error messages that never get logged because the boot process past the grub bootloader never gets that far.
commenting out the new kernel (or otherwise choosing the previous kernel-2.6.16-1.2133_FC5 release) returns the boot process to normal and I am able to get in just fine again. Rushed this one out, did we? :-)
My experience is just the opposite. 2.6.17 is the first kernel I can boot since 2.6.13.
Anyway, you need to log those kernel messages. Without them, there's little to go on.
Go get yourself an RS-232 null modem adapter, and connect the serial port on this machine to a serial port on another box. Run minicom on the other box, set it to 9600,8N1, and begin capturing.
Now, boot with "console=ttyS0,9600 console=tty0", and you'll get to capture all the kernel errors, in all their glory.