SOLVED....Installations...old and new....hanging up...

[lonerider]

..following:  "Trying to use devtmpfs (ignore errors)"

This behavior gradually started about a month ago...about twice a week when starting up.  Would then fire up and be just fine after a cold boot.  Gradually became daily occurrance, and about Monday of this week, refused to boot at all, almost always stopping in the same place, or at "Unable to mount loop file system".  The line pertaining to something called Vboxadd always failed.  

I was patient.  On one occasion, did the breakfast dishes, fed and watered the chickens, picked up the early eggs, fed and watered the rabbits, and had a second cup of coffee.  Still sitting there like a lump.

Also, it would not boot the remaster DVD of the same installation (done on May 10, 2011), which had done the hard drive installation and had "passed" media check. That DVD again passed media check, even though it would not boot regularly.  When it did, it was not able to read all my data on the hard drive partitions....probably because I'd been doing PCLOS updates quite regularly and programs had changed.  Also tried other remastered versions of PCLOS, all of which originally worked, all the way back to 2009.   Also a commercial Mepis 2008 live cd (I was getting desperate!), with no luck there either.

Since I built the machine myself two years ago, I took it completely apart back to bare case and motherboard.  Reseated the memory, power cables, the video card and USB card (but not the processor...hate that job); put in new floppy, IDE  and SATA cables and Cmos battery (Once had a computer that ate one every 3 months!!), used up a can of air (had also been blown out a month ago), reinstalled the DVD drives and hard drives, and hit the power button.
Same old, same old.

By this time, it was Friday afternoon (I'd been doing a lot of experimenting in my spare time over the week.).  I was also ticked off beside being desperate.....I keep track of my checking account on this thing, and wanted to be able to use the updated installation.  Wasn't going to happen, so wiped the hard drive (500 GB Sata) that PCLOS was on, and tried the May remaster again.  No luck; wouldn't boot.

Shut the machine off and went to do evening chores.

When I came back a couple of hours later, since I was going to be starting from scratch, I tried the original download CD from March 2011, which I'd not tried before.  It  "passed" media check, booted and I installed it so fast it was unbelievable.  Worked fine for about an hour before I shut it off and called it a day.  This morning, when I tried to boot up, AGAIN the thing stalled out at the "trying to use devtmpfs...." portion of the boot sequence.  A cold boot got it going, and I'm using it to type this.

All of which is a really long way to ask:  "Am I looking at some kind of hardware failure instead of software?"  I am not a specialist in either, just learn enough to get/keep my own computer running and I've reached the end of my string, so to speak.

I might mention that the time and date cannot be kept current.  It is 8:15 am, CDT;  the computer says it is 10:10 am.  Date today is Sept. 3; it says Sept 1.  Did the same thing all this week....on the rare times I could get anything to fire, and I reset it twice last night after the new install.  This morning it's  back to being off.  The CMOS battery was packaged, but has been in my possession for two years, so it COULD BE old.

Here is the machine:

Case = Antec 900 Gaming case (I wanted plenty of room for air flow)
Power = Rosewell Green Series RG630-2 630 watts
Motherboard = ASUS M3A 770 AM2+ RT
CPU = AMD A64 X2 6400+ 3.2 Ghz, 4 GB Ram
CPU Cooler = Rosewill RCX-Z2-EX R
Memory = Geil 2 sticks, 2 GB ea DDR2
Video Card = NVidia GEForce 8400GS 512 MB Memory
USB Card = Iogear GIC 25 (5 ports) (Added about 6 weeks ago)
Ethernet (onboard) = Athernos Comm L1 GB
Hard Drives:
  1 500 GB Sata (WD) (Partioned about 1/3 for PCLOS;  rest empty)
  1 80 GB IDE (Seagate) (Windows XP Pro X64 Version 2003 Service Pack 2
     (Windows has never been updated or on the internet;  used only for camera & scanner)
  1 80 GB IDE (Segate)  Empty....not being used....not even hooked up.

DVD Rom:  Lite On Sata
DVDRW:  Lite On Ide
Floppy:  Generic Ide

Any thoughts/suggestions would be most welcome.

Thanks.  et


 

[menotu]

Any problems booting into Windows lonerider ?

[lonerider]

I forgot  to mention that it does not affect booting Windows on the ide drive.  Sorry.....old age and senior moments...et

[AS]

Hi lonerider,

you do not mention which kernel are you using...

Can you try to boot from a official CD ? like pclinuxos-kde-2011-06.iso ?

A RAM test is suggested, available on latest official CD.

AS

[lonerider]

Should have flipped my notes over sooner......

Something else I forgot to mention....the live dvd of the remaster would USUALLY boot in Vesa and safe modes .....not in live dvd, media check, or no splash.  The installation on the Sata drive would not boot period. 

Re memory:  Windows listed physical memory only as 3.22 GB
  PCLOS control center, present install, lists memory thusly:
  Cache L1 = 256 kb
  Cache L2 = 2048 kb
  Cache L3 =  0

Back before I started with PCLOS, I was using Windows ME, and purchased a "Check It" Portable Edition (2000) put out by Smith Micro Software.  Would it be usable on the "modern" memory?  Don't really want to make things worse than they already are.

Installation was updated the last time a week before this started;  whatever the kernal involved in that update....if kernal was updated....is what the installation had.  The download CD was made on March 14 and is an official downloaded ISO and is what I installed last night; I will try to find the kernal in it.  The remaster was done on May 10 and was updated just before.  Will try to find that too, if it would be helpful.  I need to change user to do this, so will add it later if you wish.  Let me know.

Thank you both.  et

[AS]

... be sure to have a parameter like vmalloc=256M on the grub kernel parameters line, as long as you have the nvidia driver correctly installed, your card is known to work.

[Bald Brick]

Re memory:  Windows listed physical memory only as 3.22 GB
  PCLOS control center, present install, lists memory thusly:
  Cache L1 = 256 kb
  Cache L2 = 2048 kb
  Cache L3 =  0

This may be entirely irrelevant but I've tested mounting devtmpfs filesystems at different mountpoints. They always take up about 880 kB of RAM on my box, which means that if your system isn't just trying to use devtmpfs at boot but actually succeeds in doing so this could explain the discrepancy between the physical memory seen by Windows and Linux.

(A devtempfs filesystem is just used to create the equivalent of a fully populated /dev directory in RAM to speed up boot among other things. It's still experimental and why PCLinuxOS would use it I do not know.)

I tried Googling for your error message ("Trying to use devtmpfs") and most hits seemed to concern video cards and their drivers. But I haven't had time to read them.

[Old-Polack]

Should have flipped my notes over sooner......

Something else I forgot to mention....the live dvd of the remaster would USUALLY boot in Vesa and safe modes .....not in live dvd, media check, or no splash.  The installation on the Sata drive would not boot period. 

Re memory:  Windows listed physical memory only as 3.22 GB
  PCLOS control center, present install, lists memory thusly:
  Cache L1 = 256 kb
  Cache L2 = 2048 kb
  Cache L3 =  0

Back before I started with PCLOS, I was using Windows ME, and purchased a "Check It" Portable Edition (2000) put out by Smith Micro Software.  Would it be usable on the "modern" memory?  Don't really want to make things worse than they already are.

Installation was updated the last time a week before this started;  whatever the kernal involved in that update....if kernal was updated....is what the installation had.  The download CD was made on March 14 and is an official downloaded ISO and is what I installed last night; I will try to find the kernal in it.  The remaster was done on May 10 and was updated just before.  Will try to find that too, if it would be helpful.  I need to change user to do this, so will add it later if you wish.  Let me know.

Thank you both.  et

That's only the cache memory. You should be seeing something like this;

[lonerider]

Old Polack:   How do I post a screen shot to this thread? I'm seeing only what I posted earlier, and will let you look at it if you give me detailed instructions on attaching a screen shot..

Bald Brick: The devtmpfs line that I quoted is from the booting activity that is listed just prior to the sign on window being displayed;  it's the last item given before everything locks up and a cold boot is required to start over.

as:The kernal involved in this present ISO install is 2.6.33-7, according to Synaptic Package Manager list of files installed.  Whatever was on the remaster, if not the same one, is the kernal that was installed when updates were done about 10 - 14 days ago.

FYI; When I started the computer just before lunch today, it stopped in the listing that flashes by at 150 mph, right after:  "Telling INIT to go to single user mode.  INIT going to single user.  sh - 4.1#."  A cold boot got it going and it then booted with no further problems.

(Is there someway I could slow down that boot listing so I can actually see/read it?)

I've updated with Synaptic, installed KMyMoney, Abiword, Gnome Games, and XPat2 (Gotta have my Spider and Tetravex fixes!!).  Everything is working fine at the moment, but I've not shut the beast down either.

More info:  Internet access is by WildBlue Satellite, which is slow and bails out when it's really cloudy, but has always...on all new installs.....configured itself and just works.

Thank you;  what a way to spend a holiday week-end!!!  I do appreciate your attention....all of you.  et

[Old-Polack]

Old Polack:   How do I post a screen shot to this thread? I'm seeing only what I posted earlier, and will let you look at it if you give me detailed instructions on attaching a screen shot..

You need to upload the screen shot to an image hosting site, then post the link they provide here. I use this one;

http://upload.centerzone.it

Click the Tools link in the header bar. Then in the new window, click the Browse button to locate the image and choose it, then the Upload button.

When the image is uploaded, the different links look like this;



Use the Hotlink for Forum for a full sized image, as seen here.

Note:

We don't upgrade kernels automatically. You have to choose to install a new kernel, and then it will be installed along side of the existing kernel, but will become the new default kernel, so you can still use the default boot option in the boot menu to boot to the new kernel.

[lonerider]

Old Polack:Registration is temporarily disabled at Centerzone, according to their message.  Will start the process when I can register.  Thanks.  Have a good evening.  et

[Just17]

I wouldn't worry about the memory not being shown in PCC .....  it seems to be a combination of kernel and hardware that causes that omission.
I had the same situation for a year or more IIRC.

It seems your SATA drive which has PCLOS is failing to boot properly most of the time, while the IDE drive with Windos on is OK. ......  is that the correct situation?

From previous reports of hanging boots .....  it appears that the last shown line is not usually the one hanging, but the next one which is not yet shown ....  I have no recollection what that one is .....

If you have a different SATA socket on the motherboard, into which to plug the cable from the PCLOS drive, I would try that to see if it made any difference.
Also make sure it is correctly seated and not in any way loose.

Best to eliminate hardware first, if at all possible .......

regards

[AS]

as:The kernal involved in this present ISO install is 2.6.33-7, according to Synaptic Package Manager list of files installed.  Whatever was on the remaster, if not the same one, is the kernal that was installed when updates were done about 10 - 14 days ago.

As O-P said, the kernel is not updated automatically. It's a known fact that for some hardware combinations that older kernel could be an issue itself. That's also the reason I asked to test a newer ISO, because on the latest iso the kernel 2.6.38.8 is used. The result of the test could help to greatly speed up the resolution of your issue, because if the new ISO will work that will exclude causes related to hardware failures.

FYI; When I started the computer just before lunch today, it stopped in the listing that flashes by at 150 mph, right after:  "Telling INIT to go to single user mode.  INIT going to single user.  sh - 4.1#."  A cold boot got it going and it then booted with no further problems.

This type of messages usually come when the kernel is booted and the next step is to start the initial services, that are tty logins, and immediately after all the other services, mounting the partitions, starting the network, ...,  up to the graphical login.

If it's going to "single user" (a.k.a. maintenance mode), that means that very probably your system was unable to mount the root filesystem, either because of hardware failure or because of a previous unclean power off. You need at least to check the filesystems status of your machine.

I strongly suggest you to boot from a recent official liveCD, test your system, perform a filesystem check, and obtain as much as possible info about the hardware status (RAM test, compatibility of newer kernel), the filesystems status (fsck -f /dev/...... )

(Is there someway I could slow down that boot listing so I can actually see/read it?)

The basic explanation above should suffice right now, whatever is the issue I would suggest to perform at least that basic steps.

I've updated with Synaptic, installed KMyMoney, Abiword, Gnome Games, and XPat2 (Gotta have my Spider and Tetravex fixes!!).  Everything is working fine at the moment, but I've not shut the beast down either.

More info:  Internet access is by WildBlue Satellite, which is slow and bails out when it's really cloudy, but has always...on all new installs.....configured itself and just works.

Thank you;  what a way to spend a holiday week-end!!!  I do appreciate your attention....all of you.  et

The application you have installed doesn't look as related to your issue, they run a different level, not directly involving the hardware.

if you need to post screenshots, there are other services available: i.e   http://postimage.org    doesn't require registration.

AS

[Bald Brick]

From previous reports of hanging boots .....  it appears that the last shown line is not usually the one hanging, but the next one which is not yet shown ....  I have no recollection what that one is .....

I tried to check what the next line would be, but I couldn't. I didn't get any line at all mentioning devtmpfs either when I booted to my normal install or to my 64 bit test install. So there was no next line.

But I think you are right: the possibility of a hardware problem should be eliminated. It needn't be the hard drive going bad, though.

But before that: as pointed out by as 2.6.33-7 is a very old kernel.

[herve49]

Hi all,

I'm not an expert but i had in the past some similar problems :

1) date is not accord : perhaps is the battery of the bios out.

2) if windows recognize the full memory and not linux : i had in the past 2 memory sticks of 2 Go each and windows recognize 4096 Mo but linux only 2048 Mo : i had a problem on one of the 2 sticks. On insert 2 new sticks this problem was solved.

Sorry but for devtmps, i can't help

Hervé