fresh installation freezes at: kjournald starting

[jomiller]

Alright, I have just installed a fresh copy of 2005.0, both from strage2 and stage3 and I am having the same problems when I try to boot the system.

The system loads lilo fine, starts the boot process fine and gives no errors or kernel panics and continues on until it reaches the line:

kjournald starting commit interval 5 seconds

and that is it. Nothing else happens. My disk's are formatted with two ext3 partitions (hda1 = /boot and hda2 = /) and one reiserfs partition (hda4) which is not even set to mount anywhere in fstab. Ext2, ext3, and reiserfs are all enabled in the kernel (not as modules), likewise, reiserfsprogs are installed.

I assume this is an issue with the journal of the file systems, that is why I mention all of this. This is getting to be very aggrevating, because of this problem I can't even view the logs to see what is happening (it never gets far enough to write them). I even booted off of the cd and chroot'd the system to check the log files on hda2, nothing. If anyone has and idea, please let me know.

[wjholden]

What hardware are you running? This sounds like your kernel wasn't correctly configured to handle your hard disk or something...use the LiveCD and boot back in and then, using the lspci and lsmod commands, make sure you have everything you need for your hardware compiled into your kernel and loading in modules.d. Have you looked into the possibility of a hard drive problem using hdparm -tT /dev/hda (as described in the very beginning of the handbok)? Also could just be a grub error, but I find that less likely than a simple kernel bug. What kernel?

[jomiller]

I am running an AMD athlon xp, 512 MB RAM (128 shared with the onboard nvidia video), maxtor 40GB HDD on the first ide chain, a MSI main board with the nforce2 chipset. I am using the onboard video, lan, and a Ensoniq 1370 soundcard, I also have a toshiba DVD-RW drive on the second ide chain. I have the nforce drivers turned on in the kernel (I do not have the nvidia framebuiffer turned on though as it conflicts with the nvidia drivers). It also has a MA 301 netgear wireless card in it, but the orinocco and hermes drivers are compiled for that too. Agpgart is enabled, alsa and the ensoniq driver, reiserfs, ext2 and ext3, MTRR, scsi emulation (for the dvd-rw) and everything else that I can think off. There are no modules from the cd that are listed that aren't compiled (mostly into the kernel, not as modules). It isn't like I have never built a kernel before, but this is the first time that one has broke in this manner. I would almost prefer to see a kernel panic. Should I post my kernel config for review or does this give you any ideas. If anything strikes you, let me know. This is getting really aggrevating.

-jomiller

[jomiller]

I am a moron, the kernel version is 2.6.11r4 from gentoo. Nothing special that I know off. I may try the genkernel stuff just to see what happens.

-jomiller
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Ooops, wrong window, just ignore that.

[wjholden]

Strange, you've almost described my desktop/server, it has an nVidia card and nForce2 chipset with an Athlon XP.

I'm guess it is a weird kernel misconfiguration or possibly bug. What I'd do if I were you would be to emerge a 2.6.10 variant of gentoo-sources and go through that with a fresh configuration (that way if you missed something the first time hopefully not the second time). I've been searching the forum and don't see anything, so I dunno.

[jomiller]

I think I will try rebuilding the kernel from scratch as per your suggestion. I have it up and running with the genkernel but there is a lot of crap in there that I don't need. Oh well, I also noticed that the Ensoniq module is failing to load, that is kinda weird I thought, but I don't have a choice as the onboard sound is fried. The MA311 is not working either now, but that is due to lack of wireless configuration, back to the livecd to emerge more packages. *DOH!* Oh well I will post the results of the next kernel rebuild.

-jomiller