BUG #1921 - Inspiron boot freeze

[Martin Maney]

The old Inspiron 8000 never used to have this problem, but this morning
I finally got around to upgrading its BIOS.  It was a large step, from
version A10 to version A23, and the release notes indicated that at
least Windows ME might need some updates to avoid having "the system or
some peripherals" not work right.  They were both right and wrong about
that...

After the upgrade, I found that only Ubuntu's 2.6 kernels did indeed
freeze during boot.  I observed the freeze to occur at various
locations, apparently at random, from very early (a line or two past
loading the kernel and initrd) to past the point where those harmless
errors (*pci stuff for hotplug) have appeared.  Or maybe later than
that - both the linux-686 (2.6.8.1-13) and the -386 kernel left over
from installation time (but perhaps updated since then) behaved much
the same in several trials.

FWIW, all of Windows ME, the old Woody maintenance partition and the
Libranet 2.8.1 partition that hasn't been booted in a while all booted
without any trouble.  (well, aside from not being setup for the
ethernet, which was changed a while back from the Xircom PCMCIA card to
the 3Com mini-pci).  Ubuntu's 2.6.8.1 kernel did require both noapic
and nolapic in order to boot; with them, it seems to work fine.

Oh drat, I forgot to add the options to the boot menu...

-- 
...and of course you must be careful not to overwrite the bounds of
memory blocks, free a memory block twice, forget to free a memory block,
use a memory block after it's been freed, use memory that you haven't
explicitly allocated, etc.  We C++ programmers have developed tricks
to help us deal with this sort of thing, in much the same way that people
who suffer severe childhood trauma develop psychological mechanisms to
insulate themselves from those experiences.  -- Joseph A. Knapka