Boot questions

[Derek Broughton]

Larry Hartman wrote:

> 1.  At boot time, immediately after GRUB starts I receive this error:
> 
> MP-BIOS: 8254 timer not connected to......
> 
> I googled it and discovered that it has to do with the noapic option in
> the
> boot process.  So I added noapic and was unable to boot except in recovery
> mode.  Here is the applicable boot.list portion:
> 
> ## additional options to use with the default boot option, but not with
> ## the alternatives
> ## e.g. defoptions=vga=791 resume=/dev/hda5
> # defoptions=quiet splash

Precisely as expected!  Which part of "use with the default boot option, but
not with the alternatives" is unclear :-)  Sorry, it's actually a pretty
common mistake.

If you want an option available to both the default and alternate boot
stanzas, you put it in the "kopt" variable.

> I understand there is a nolapic option as well as noapic...any difference?

Yeah...  but don't ask me what the difference is :-)

> 2.  Also in the middle of the boot process, when my drives are mounted,
> the
> splash screen goes away and never returns....all check boxes afterwards. 
> How to fix this...not that it has any great importance, just curious to
> know...

My _bet_ (and I could tell for sure if I saw your boot process) is that it's
in the Network initialization.   The splash intentionally times out if it
doesn't get an [OK] response in a given time - otherwise you could sit
watching the splash forever.  My network startup waits for 30 (or maybe 60)
seconds if it isn't connected (presumably a dhcp timeout - it's not
something I care about as I almost never reboot) and the splash screen goes
away.

> 3.  Last, the final checkbox line in the boot has a "fail" warning.  I
> believe it has to do with apache2 webserver.....which does load...I see it
> in the
> memory....but the line goes by so quickly I can not read it all.  What
> file on the system contains all of these checkbox lines so that I can
> review them and troubleshoot?

Just use ctrl-alt-f8, and it puts you back to the terminal where the boot
process was logging.  Interestingly, when doing this to find out which
terminal it was on, I discovered one of _my_ last scripts (S99nxserver) has
an error, and _it_ is working fine, too!
-- 
derek