reboot problem with gentoo, windows is fine on toshiba p30

[kicker]

Hi there again (well i've posted in portage a few hours ago ) I gotta love this forum, the gentoo.org site, the whole community behind this.. i'm just pissed off to have used mandrake for over a year now and feared gentoo since the beginning.. cause with all the ressource... it ends up easier.. and gotta love the fact that you really own your system.

so let's get to the problem shall we? I've had this problem since i've installed any linux on this machine.... The computer just can't reboot... but what's even weirder... it's that it seems to be a grub problem... (that makes me think of something.. maybe i should try lilo instead i dunno, i'll wait to hear a bit from you before venturing in installing lilo) but i can't be sure... cause on mandrake, suse, fedora, (suse and fedora use grub, and mandrake lilo, by default) but one thing in common tho i just couldn't reboot... i went on the net to find an answer for this... was surprised to see that nobody in here had the same problem before.. but i found this guy in 2003 (just noticed now, cause i went again to look for that issue.. cause now it's boggling me more than ever since i installed gentoo) who had the exact same problem with his toshiba a75 (got a p30) and he had found a solution (oh yeah.. forgot to tell something before.. it does the same thing (hangs) when i reboot in grub... ) and another thing, when i reboot in linux, either with ctrl-alt-del (which is trapped and does init 6), or reboot or shutdown -r now.. it goes down the whole process, when it just should reboot, the thing hangs there with a black screen, just as if it was going to reboot (the fan slow a little, but not as much) and ctrl-alt-del wont work at this point, power off either (i have to hold it) and caps lock doesn't lit the light.. so it's really frozen.

the solution... (have a major backdraw now tho) he found that by enabling USB Legacy support in his bios, it fixed the reboot, but disabled his touchpad... now i didn't care in mandrake, cause i was lucky, it was working even with usb legacy on.. i was pondering why.. but didn't care, it worked ! but now that's i'm on gentoo.. my touchpad will go down the road too... when i have it disabled (can't reboot) i have my device in /dev/input/event0 (keyboard) 1 (touchpad) 2 (usb mouse), but when it's enabled.. it's 0 keyboard, and 1 usb mouse, the touchpad disappear... now when i'm at home.. i dont really care about the touchpad... cause the main reason why i'm doing all this, and i wanna learn as much linux as i can... i wanna go around my neighborhood and suggest people a free alternative to windows.. (well i'm gonna charge them a fee to install it and maintain it, that's the whole idea behind.. but i want to show them something.. and something that's gonna work... but when i mean work it's flawlessly.. i dont want even a small hiccup when i'll be doing a demo cause it's sure if a "blue screen" happens.. they will just tell me to gtfo (get the f*ck out) and i dont really want that.. cause i really believe linux is better than windows.. and if more and more people start using it.. maybe they are gonna talk about it to their friends and maybe microsoft will be under linux in the % of computer running linux vs windows.. and that goes to pretty much all the big companies. not just in software... anyway, wont go there, it's not the place.. but you get the point.. i wanna spread the word about linux.. and especially gentoo.. i was learning mandrake cause i tried lots of distro, and mandrake worked really well.. probably the best for me from all the distro i tried.. i tried quite a few ... but was always coming back to mandrake.. this i met gentoo.. i feel gentoo even more responsive than mandrake.. cause i found mandrake more responsive in general than suse or fedora for example.. suse in my opinion is good looking.. but its a POS. I dunno why novell brand this.. so much people are complaining about suse.. and had the same experience as them.. didn't worked really good on my computer.. but again.. back in mandrake 10.0 days i tried suse 9.1 on a desktop i had instead at the time, and the thing wasn't even usable... i got the desktop, but almost nothing was working.. and i didn't knew linux as much as now.. not that i know a whole lot more.. but still.. anyway... so that's about it.. i've really nothing to say against gentoo up to now... it's a bit more hassle.. but so much more rewarding.. you are actually doing something instead of boring wizard and stuff like in mandrake.. but once gentoo's setup, it seems really easy to maintain, just update the tree and system once a while and that's about it... or doesn't it?

Anyway, it's quite a long message, but when i start writing, i write quite a bit.. you gotta get used to that!

Pierre-Andre

PS: I know I can be hard to read.. if you do, please tell me i'm gonna break down in paragraph.. cause i didn't really noticed i had typed that much in the last one

Thanks for everything by the way

[kicker]

Anyone have any ideas on a workaround for this? As you can probably guess it's irritating, cause i can't reboot remotely if i need to, and i need to shutdown the computer everytime i want to reboot.
If there was a bios upgrade for this laptop.. i'm really disappointed by this laptop.. It's my first laptop.. and I picked toshiba cause I knew they used to have a pretty good reputation in the laptop industry.. but upon my research for a solution to this, i found that many people are having trouble with toshiba. Maybe they aren't anymore what they used to be.. well it's seems to be what's happenning to almost every big company nowaday.

Thanks in advance for your answer can't wait to have one on this one!

Pierre-Andre

PS: Btw, i took the nick kicker not because i think i kick ass, i'm a very modest person, but because i once used to own a kicker car audio kit and came upon a site who asked a nick at the time and it's the first thing that sprung to my mind.. so please don't take it wrong