failure to boot

[Gerhard H. W. May]

> Am Sa, den 13.11.2004 schrieb Gerhard H. W. May um 13:10:
>
>> I just installed FC3 on my Toshiba Tecra 8200 and it fails to boot the
>> machine. It repeatedly gets stuck after the message 'Initializing
>> hardware... storage network audio'. No change after that.
>
> You very certainly boot with "rhgb quiet" boot parameters. Enter the
> grub configuration at grub goot screen by pressing "3" and delete the
> named parameters from kernel line. Then boot. Maybe you get further or
> at least you get more output to report.
>
>> Gerhard
>
> Alexander
>

I have now done that. The machine hangs at the same position during 
booting. The last few lines on the screen are (I have to type this 
manually):

-------------------------
Freeing unused kernel memory: 144k freed
Red Hat nash version 4.1.18 starting
Mounted /proc filesystem
Mounting sysfs
Creating /dev
Starting udev
Loading jdb,ko module
Loading ext3.ko module
Creating root device
Mounting root filesystem
kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
Switching to new root
SELinux: Disabled at runtime.
SELinux: Unregistering netfilter hooks
INIT: version 2.85 booting
Setting default font (latarcyrheb-sun16):	[ok]

Welcome to Fedora Core
Press 'I' to enter interactive startup.

Starting udev:	[ok]
Initializing hardware...	storage network audio
----------------------------

All this is very cryptic to me. I tried to follow Mustafa Orkun's 
thread 'FC3 boot problem', but could not understand most of it. I also 
found the bug 137571 on bugzilla 
(http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=137571), which 
seems to be very similar. The screenshot in that bug report is very 
similar to my screen on startup. I tried 'ctrl+c', which got me a 
little bit further, but then the machine hung again. The additional 
messages read:

----------------------------
Press 'I' to enter interactive startup.
[This is where I pressed ctrl-c]
INIT: Entering runlevel: 5
Applying Intel IA32 Microcode update:	[ok]
Starting readahead_early:	[ok]
Checking for new hardware:	[ok]
touch: cannot touch '/var/lock/subsys/kudzu': Read-only file system
Starting cpuspeed:	[ok]
touch: cannot touch '/var/lock/subsys/cpuspeed': Read-only file system
Applying iptables firewall rules:	[ok]
touch: cannot touch '/var/lock/subsys/iptables': Read-only file system
Setting network parameters:	[ok]
Bringing up loopback interface:	[ok]
Bringing up interface eth0:
Determining IP information for eth0...failed; no link present. Check 
cable?
	[FAILED}
Bringing up interface eth1: orinoco_cs device eth1 does not seem to be 
present, delaying initialization.
	[FAILED]
touch: cannot touch '/var/lock/subsys/network': Read-only file system
Starting system logger:
-----------------------------

This is where it hangs. However, while I was typing this, after quite a 
long time of doing nothing, more messages started scrolling over the 
monitor, ending with a blue screen with a white window on it saying:

-----------------------------
I could not start the X server (your graphical environment) due to some 
internal error. Please check your system administrator or check your 
syslog to diagnose. In the meantime this display will be disabled. 
Please restart gdm when the problem is corrected.
<ok>
-----------------------------

If I press enter I get a command line where I can log in, but as I am 
not exactly familiar with either Linux nor the Bash shell I don't 
really know what I can or should do. I don't even know the command to 
switch the damn thing of.

If anyone reads this and can make any sense of it, I would appreciate 
pointers.

Thanks.

Gerhard