Re: [Staffslug] SuSE 10.3 poser

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Kevanf1 wrote: No, if you can get as far as half way through the boot process or even to the nvidia splash screen, it's not the bootloader. Not exactly anyway, though it could be a bad kernel module or something. To eliminate this, choose a different kernel from your boot menu if you can, then reboot and choose the default kernel again, see if you can boot successfully. If the problem is the same no matter which kernel you choose, you need to get your system up and read the logs. In fact even if this points out that you have a dodgy kernel and booting from a different kernel solved the problem, you should look at your logs anyway to see what was causing the problem. What you need to, I think, is to get the system up from the DVD and then read your system logs. They live in /var/log. The boot process log is /var/log/dmesg, kernel and other output is in /var/log/messages. You should be looking for errors to determine at which point it failed during boot. if it's a live CD, you might need to mount your hard disk and then check the files on the disks /var/log directory. You might need to do this as root, use the less command with the file you want to view: $ less /var/log/messages Use up and down arrows to do the obvious, use q to quit. If you're in a live cd, you'll need to know whether var is on it's own partition or on the root partition, what filesystem it's formatted with, the partition's device name and how to mount a partition. We can do this in another email. As an aside, you should boot your PC with boot messages visible, not hidden behind the boot splash screen, so you can see what is going on. What does this DVD boot thingy do? I don't use SUSE. Does it bring the system up from the DVD like a live CD? Or does it use the bootloader on the DVD and bring your system up using the OS that is installed on your hard disk? The system giving up at different places would suggest a hardware problem to me, maybe a dying hard disk, but you would see this in your logs. Come back when you have tried the above. If the DVD boots your machine into a live CD environment, it will add a layer of complexity to what would be my next suggestions, so tell me whether you are familiar with disk and partition device names, mounting disk partitions and reading text files on the command line. Regards, Adam Sweet - -- http://blog.adamsweet.org/