System hangs when booting

[asociate]

Hi,

iam newbie to linux. i have installed redhat linux 7.1
in my system.i have two partitions in my hard disk
windows and linux.the installation process has gone fine
without any problem. it has detected my graphics card, keyboard ,mouse..... everything with out any problem. i even tested my display settings.after installation when the system boots for the first time through linux, the system i getting hanged.i dont know what could be the reason. i installed linux a number of times but iam facing the same problem. it is stopping at

Starting kswapd v1.8


that's all .. its not going further. my keyboard is getting hanged and i have to switch off the system for again restarting.

i couldnt give u the bootlog because i dont know how to
capture it which will be helpful for further investigation.

My system configuration is:

Compaq presario 2262

300 Mhz cyrix MII processor
Intel chipset with on board video and sound card
128 MB Ram
4.3 GB seagate HDD ( two partions 2gb & 2gb)
sis 5598 graphics card 4MB shared video memory
ESS 1869 Sound card
PS2 Mouse
101 keys keyboard
LG Cdrom 52x

please help me how to solve this problem.
or else tell me where i can find a good tech support.

thanks & Regards
aak

 

[fluid11]

Do you get to a command prompt at all, or does it hang before you can do anything?

"i couldnt give u the bootlog because i dont know how to
capture it which will be helpful for further investigation."

Type the following to send the boot up messages to a text file...

dmesg > /root/file.txt

Replace /root with the directory that you want to save the file to.

ChrisP If someone resolves an issue for you, or was helpful, please click the link on the bottom left hand corner of their post to give them a "star" letting them know they helped you.

 

[asociate]

hi chris,

my system gets hanged before i get the login prompt. even before the interactive option which the system gives. as suggested by u to capture the boot process i couldn't capture. any how iam not able to boot from harddisk .i tried booting from floppy which i made at the time f installation. even this is getting hanged at that particular point.( Starting kswapd v1.8 ). I used the red hat cd for booting in which i have choosen to boot with linux rescue option. where its taking me to shell. but here iam unable to mount floppy its saying connot file dev or directory. can u tell me how i can mount the floppy in rescue mode.if i could mount it i can capture the boot process by using dmesg .before some days back i installed red hat 6.2 on the same system. it worked with out any problem. now i freshly installed redhat 7.1 which is giving the problem. even i tried installing red hat 6.2 and upgraded to 7.1 but the same thing happening.

during installation i didn't face any problem
the partions defined were

swap - 256 mb
boot - 60mb
root - 1727 (remaining space)

since iam a newbie can u suggest how i can come over this situation.

waiting for ur reply..
thanks
aak

 

[asociate]

i have captured the boot process here it shows.

Linux version 2.4.2-2BOOT (root@porky.devel.redhat.com) (gcc version 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.1 2.96-79)) #1 Sun Apr 8 18:24:33 EDT 2001
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
BIOS-e820: 000000000009f400 @ 0000000000000000 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 0000000000000c00 @ 000000000009f400 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 0000000000014c00 @ 00000000000eb400 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 0000000007b00000 @ 0000000000100000 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 0000000000014c00 @ 00000000fffeb400 (reserved)
On node 0 totalpages: 31744
zone(0): 4096 pages.
zone DMA has max 32 cached pages.
zone(1): 27648 pages.
zone ŒÔ"ÀŒÔ"À has max 216 cached pages.
zone(2): 0 pages.
zone `Õ"À`Õ"À has max 1 cached pages.
Kernel command line: initrd=initrd.img lang= devfs=nomount vga=788 BOOT_IMAGE=vmlinuz rescue
Initializing CPU#0
Detected 233.863 MHz processor.
Console: colour dummy device 80x25
Calibrating delay loop... 466.94 BogoMIPS
Memory: 120740k/126976k available (1193k kernel code, 5848k reserved, 84k data, 108k init, 0k highmem)
Checking if this processor honours the WP bit even in supervisor mode... Ok.
Dentry-cache hash table entries: 16384 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
Buffer-cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)
Page-cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 6, 262144 bytes)
Inode-cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)
CPU: Before vendor init, caps: 0080a135 00000000 00000000, vendor = 1
CPU: After vendor init, caps: 0080a135 00000000 00000000 00000004
CPU: After generic, caps: 0080a135 00000000 00000000 00000004
CPU: Common caps: 0080a135 00000000 00000000 00000004
CPU: Cyrix M II 3.5x Core/Bus Clock stepping 08
Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.
Checking for popad bug... OK.
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfd9d4, last bus=0
PCI: Using configuration type 1
PCI: Probing PCI hardware
PCI: Using IRQ router SIS [1039/0008] at 00:01.0
PCI: Found IRQ 9 for device 00:01.1
PCI: The same IRQ used for device 00:01.2
Disabling direct PCI/PCI transfers.
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
Starting kswapd v1.8

 

[JohnLynn]

I just had a very similar problem with RH7.3.

I applied the latest Bios update applied to the motherboard
and it booted.

It may be worth a shot.

John G. Lynn