Wont Boot Past "VFS: Mounted Root"

[simusid]

This is a followup from a post a few months ago. Basically not much has changed. I cannot get an MSI RX480 (Neo2) motherboard to boot. I have tried various IDE and SATA drives, 2 vid cards (pci) and different sticks of RAM. I have tried every default/failsafe/simple BIOS setting and as far as I can tell, pretty much every knoppix boot option. I finally gave up and just assumed there was something wrong with the mobo and I RMA'ed it.

I got the replacement and just put it in and naturally I'm seeing the exact same behavior. The boot process will always proceed normally and will eventually get to:

EXT2-fs warning: checktime reached, running e2fsck is recommended
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)

and nothing will happen beyond that. I've waited hours. As I said, this happens with the regular, debug, failsafe and with every option that I have tried. A minute ago I just tried:

boot: knoppix vga=0 debug -b 3

and again it sits at "VFS: Mounted root ..."

The system will respond to ctrl-alt-del and reboot. It's not frozen. There are no error messages or anything out of the ordinary. I've never seen a system this stubborn! What the heck could it be??? I really don't want to spend $$$ on yet another mobo :(

[Harry Kuhman]

...I have tried various IDE and SATA drives, 2 vid cards (pci) and different sticks of RAM. I have tried every default/failsafe/simple BIOS setting and as far as I can tell, pretty much every knoppix boot option. ....
I don't know what your problem is, or what you have on those hard disks, but since Knoppix doesn't need a hard disk at all I would suggest unplugging all of the hard drives from the motherboard and try booting again. You certainly shouldn't get a "VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)" error that way, and it's not unlikely that it might boot completely, allowing you to rule out the video cards, RAM, mb and anything else you might have changed. Then you can focus on why the strange file system message is coming up. Alternately, if the system still fails to boot it will likely give a different error and you'll be able to rule out the ext2 file system.

[simusid]

booting with just the CDROM, no hard drives....using a brand new IDE cable.
Same thing :(

What the heck is left? Could it possibly be the CPU?? That would be really bizzare.

[Harry Kuhman]

Very strange error, but even stranger with no hard disk. Sounds like the only file system left that it can be talking about is the CD. Did you check the md5 sum before burning the disc? Have you tried booting the disc on another system? Although it's a lot less useful than checking the md5 before burning, have you tried the testcd boot code?

[simusid]

yet another update. New CDROM drive and a newly burned and tested Knoppix CD. Yeah, you guessed it, the same thing.

So with JUST the mobo, a brand new CPU (not overheating), no hard drives, two sticks of RAM (tested seperately) and a PCI vid card this repeatedly freezes at the exact same spot.

What parameters can I use at boot to use the most generic possible video mode?

I'm ready to heave this whole system out the window but I've got $400 into it :(

[Mr Ranger]

You wouldn't be running a Core 2 Duo would you? I can't get it to work either (different error). I tried at least a half a dozen different linux live CD's and the only one that will boot on my system is Ubuntu 6.10. See if that one will boot for you.

Mr Ranger