Suse 9.3 >>EDIT<< Fixed.

[Slacker]

I have been playing with Suse 9.3 for a little while, learning where everything is, clicking this and that, well one of those times when I clicked "that" I screwed the pooch and now I cant start in other than failsafe

I tried a rescue using the boot disk from the install, it said it fixed a couple of things and asked if I wanted to rewrite the boot record, restarted and still same problem.

What I did that I think caused the whole problem in the first place was change the dma level of my dvdrw to udma33, when I did this the comp locked and I had to hit reset and it would not load after that

I am dual booting with winXP, no trouble with that.
I can start Suse in failsafe and do "init 5" to load the gui (kde) and do everything failsafe allows.

If I try to start in normal mode it goes through all of the startup stuff, shows the "nVidia" logo (6800GT) then shows the stopwatch spinning, then a black arrow with white outline is on the screen and it locks up.

It seems like it is just before the login screen when it locks :[/b]Pullhair(

What if I disconnect the offending dvdrw? would that cause the dma entry in whatever.cfg to be removed? if so what would I have to do to reconnect the dvdrw without the problem returning, like "add/remove hardware" type stuff

 

[nweaver]

not sure with Suse, but does hitting F2 take you out of the splash screen and show you what is really happening?

 

[Slacker]

"ESC" does that, it goes all the way through all that, locks just before the login screen.

 

[nweaver]

what is the last thing on the screen (last few lines of text)

 

[Slacker]

Originally posted by: nweaver
what is the last thing on the screen (last few lines of text)

I will check and post back tomorrow, I think it does everything normally through startup, the stopwatch I mentioned is part of the gui, it is animated/color so it looks like the gui starts to load.

I will copy down the last bit and let you know, thanks.

Just now I shut down xp and unplugged power to the optical drives and started up Suse with no problem, I am posting from it now.

What do I need to do to eliminate the problem so it wont come back when I want to plug in the optical drives?

 

[pcgeek11]

Originally posted by: Slacker

Originally posted by: nweaver
what is the last thing on the screen (last few lines of text)

I will check and post back tomorrow, I think it does everything normally through startup, the stopwatch I mentioned is part of the gui, it is animated/color so it looks like the gui starts to load.

I will copy down the last bit and let you know, thanks.

Just now I shut down xp and unplugged power to the optical drives and started up Suse with no problem, I am posting from it now.

What do I need to do to eliminate the problem so it wont come back when I want to plug in the optical drives?

Actually, unplugging the drives and booting may have take care of the problem by itself. When you plug it back in and boot back up it may re-detect the optical drive and the DMA Mode reset to the default values as they were before you changed them.

Give it a try and let us know what happens.

pcgeek11

 

[Slacker]

Originally posted by: pcgeek11

Originally posted by: Slacker

Originally posted by: nweaver
what is the last thing on the screen (last few lines of text)

I will check and post back tomorrow, I think it does everything normally through startup, the stopwatch I mentioned is part of the gui, it is animated/color so it looks like the gui starts to load.

I will copy down the last bit and let you know, thanks.

Just now I shut down xp and unplugged power to the optical drives and started up Suse with no problem, I am posting from it now.

What do I need to do to eliminate the problem so it wont come back when I want to plug in the optical drives?

Actually, unplugging the drives and booting may have take care of the problem by itself. When you plug it back in and boot back up it may re-detect the optical drive and the DMA Mode reset to the default values as they were before you changed them.

Give it a try and let us know what happens.

pcgeek11

That is exactly what happened, I can start normally now.

I now believe the problem to be that the dvdrw is the primary slave on a promise controller card, my other optical drive, which is connected to the onboard ide, works fine at dma33.

 

[pcgeek11]

That is exactly what happened, I can start normally now.

I now believe the problem to be that the dvdrw is the primary slave on a promise controller card, my other optical drive, which is connected to the onboard ide, works fine at dma33.

Great! I'm glad you have it working again. I am also a Suse 9.3 user, I just upgraded from 9.2. There were lots of improvements between the two.

pcgeek11