Re: [tlug] Hangup on etch boot

[<stephen@example.com>]

Charles Muller writes:

 > Regarding my intermittent hangup on Etch boot, I've discovered that it 
 > does not hang if I removed my external usb drive, so apparently this is 
 > causing some kind of conflict.

More likely the drive firmware or the kernel driver stack is just
bogus.  Modern hardware has come a long way in terms of avoiding
conflicts from first principles, but programmers, especially firmware
writers for hardware aimed at the Windows market, tend to cut
corners.

 > I took the entry for the drive out of fstab, and this doesn't seem to 
 > make any difference. I also confirmed that without my fstab entry, the 
 > drive is still assigned the same address of "/dev/sdb1".

I think what we need to see is the contents of dmesg, once for booting
w/o then hotplugging the drive (have you done that? does it work?),
and once with the drive plugged in at boot (there should be remnants
up to the hang, probably in /var/log/kern.log or /var/log/syslog).
Send the whole thing, as usual, but FYI what we're going to be looking
at is the initialization of the USB driver stack and detection of
attached devices.  You may find it amusing to try to figure it out for
yourself (but don't be tempted to filter out "irrelevant" information,
except for stuff related to privacy, IP numbers and the like).