[Tfug] OS Puzzle

[Robert Hunter]

On Sat, Nov 01, 2008 at 09:46:09PM -0500, Jeremy D Rogers wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 8:56 PM, <arizray at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> > As a bit of history several people helped me to try and solve what I
> > perceived as a problem with the gnome desktop. Basically during boot the
> > system halts right after login. I pc is a gateway P4 2.8ghz, 1.5gb memory,
> > 80gb HDD machine. I was successfully using the machine until recently.
> >
> > After much troubleshooting I decided to swap the "bad" harddrive into my
> > other machine and it worked perfectly. Had the Ubuntu (ver. 8.10) progress
> > bar present during boot etc. Placing it the original machine still had the
> > fault of course but I now know that the S/W on the drive is ok. T then tried
> > to T/S further by removing the 2 memory cards, one at a time to see if one
> > of the modules might be bad and no improvement or solution was found so I
> > have to assume that the memory is o.k.
> >
> > The video card is part of the mother board and I don't know how to test it
> > as it does display.
> >
> > I would like anyone's ideas.
> >
> 
> 
> When you say it 'halts' do you mean it freezes, or it shuts down? If it
> freezes, what does it look like? Does the screen go blank, or just stay as
> it was, is there a delay, etc?
> When it boots, instead of loging into gnome, can you switch to a virt
> terminal (ctl+alt+F1) and login. See if it has the same behavior. Maybe you
> can narrow it down some in such a way.
> JDR

I basically agree with Jeremy.  This sounds like a potential video
driver problem.   You may want to try what Jeremy suggested.  Also, one
thing that I've found quite handy is having a serial port console
(e.g, a laptop attached with a null modem cable) to capture all
console output.  You may need to edit /etc/inittab.   The first step
in debugging something is to obtain to diagnostic output.

--Rob



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