hanging on bootup: scanning for harddisk partitions

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Originally Posted by mln

:( Sorry but with the command: knoppix nodma the system is hanging on the same point.
But with the command: knoppix no dma the system is booting so as told

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It will do the same thing then with the command knoppix dma no or knoppix chaneyrunsthecountry dma or just knoppix dma. Unrecognized commands are ignored. no is unrecognized. My understanding (thanks to James) is that dma was enabled by default in version 3.4 through 3.7 (maybe 3.3. also, I'm not sure). Versions 3.8.x and 3.9 have gone back to nodma being the default, as it was in versions like 3.1. If knoppix no dma lets you boot then you are using a version where nodma is the default and your systems needs dma to boot properly, the no is being ignored.

Ok, Thank you. The laptop starts good with DMA but the harddisk partition table or partitions types is not recognized under Knoppix 3.7 .. 3.9 But in Knoppix 3.2 the harddisk is accessable
I hope you can help me to resolve this problem

I have a very similar laptop to yours and I've never been able to solve the problem. I think 3.4 was the last version of Knoppix that worked correctly for me. I did determine that the "nofstab" cheat code allows me to boot the system, but that's because it doesn't access the hard drive in that case. I've tried every miserable cheat code and kernel parameter you can imagine: nodma, acpi=off, pci=biosirq - nothing works! It's hard drive access that causes the problem somehow. For example, boot into command line only mode, like this:

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knoppix 2 nofstab

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Now try, for example, to read the partition table on the hard drive with fdisk, but use strace to print out the system calls that fdisk is performing:

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strace fdisk /dev/hda

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You'll see that it dies when it attempts the read() system call to actually read the partition table from the disk. It calls read() and it never returns. This leads me to suspect the kernel rather than anything specific to Knoppix.

I had Mandrake 10.1 on that laptop, running Mandrake's 2.6.8 kernel, and it was fine. I recently wiped Mandrake and installed Ubuntu, which worked fine with their stock 2.6.10 kernel and a custom-compiled 2.6.12 kernel. So either it's something specific to 2.6.11 or it's something about the way the kernel has been compiled for Knoppix. At this point I've pretty much given up - I don't know what else I can try to help diagnose the problem. If you ever find a solution I'd love like hell to hear it. At least one other user on this forum has the exact same problem, too - it was he who originally clued me in to using strace to see exactly where fdisk was hanging.

any help out there? It keeps hanging up on scanning for harddisk partitions... I have tried several of the cheats and cannot figure out how to work around it... Anyone else able to beat this....

What happend to my desktop instead are some sporadics hangings at boot on casual points of boot itself, with an average of one time every four/five boots. Nothing so tragic, when it happen I push reboot button and solve the problem. I'm courious if someone else have experienced that issue and if there's a way to investigate reasons.