Bootup freezes at "Starting up..."

[Charlie Kravetz]

On Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:24:07 -0400
Michael Peek <peek at tiem.utk.edu> wrote:

> Hi gurus,
> 
> First of all, I'm attempting something screwy, so a little backstory
> is probably important.  I have some servers with large (>16TB)
> RAIDS. Disgruntled with JFS and XFS, I decided to try Ext4.  The
> servers are running 8.10 amd64 server (linux-image-2.6.27-11-server)
> and fully up to date.  So I downloaded the source packages for
> e2fsprogs-1.41.4, linux-2.6.28-11, and wireless-crda-1.7 from the
> Jaunty tree and compiled them.
> 
> I have two servers:
> 
> Server #1:
> SuperMicro X7DWE
> 2 x Intel Xeon E5420 2.5GHz CPUs
> 8GB RAM
> Adaptec RAID 51645
> 
> 
> Server #2:
> Same as server #1, except with two Adaptec RAID 51645 cards
> 
> On server #1:
> + New kernel
> + wireless-cdra
> + e2fsprogs
> + reboot
> = Flawless victory!
> 
> Formatted the RAID ext4 and it's running like a top.
> 
> So I repeated this process on server #2, but when I rebooted, I was 
> greeted with:
> 
> Boot from (hd0,0) ext3 c7447ceb-e203-418b-9c2b-d76d8d89f99e
> Starting up...
> 
> And then the server hangs.  And by hang, I mean it stayed at that
> point for an hour and never booted up.
> 
> So I rebooted into the old kernel and edited /boot/grub/menu.lst.  I 
> removed "quiet" and "splash" from the kernel parameters list for the 
> 2.6.28 kernel and rebooted.  The bootup process hangs at:
> 
> [    0.392901] CPU0: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5420 W 2.50GHz stepping 
> 0...<off screen>
> [    0.400000] Booting processor 1 APIC 0x4 ip 0x6000
> 
> 
> The next thing I tried was noacpi and noapic, no good.  Thinking that
> I had it wrong, I tried acpi=off and apci=off.  No good.
> 
> As a last resort, I turned ACPI off in BIOS.  No good.
> 
> [    0.013284] Setting APIC routing to flat
> [    0.013344] CPU0: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5420 @ 2.50GHz 
> stepping...<off screen>
> [    0.130848] Booting processor 1 APIC 0x4 ip 0x6000
> <And... freeze!>
> 
> I am now officially desperate.  Does anyone have any ideas what to do
> next?
> 
> Thanks for any help you can offer,
> 
> Michael
> 
> 

If the only difference is 2 RAID cards in server 2, why not pull one
and try again?

I do not any RAID controller cards, nor any actual server. My hardware
is mostly old, P3 and P2 systems.

-- 
Charlie Kravetz 
Linux Registered User Number 425914          [http://counter.li.org/]
Never let anyone steal your DREAM.           [http://keepingdreams.com]