Scott R. Godin writes:
I'm running a seagate 250GB SATA drive as the main boot drive of the system, non-raid. The motherboard apparently has some sort of deal going that causes sata_nv to also load, but there are no ports on the motherboard for connection. I wound up installing the promise card instead to use the new hard disk: $ lspci |grep -i promise 01:08.0 Mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC20575 (SATAII150 TX2plus) (rev 02) dmidecode shows the motherboard Version: ASUS A7N266-VM ACPI BIOS Rev 1004/AA, and /proc/cpuinfo shows model name : AMD Athlon(TM) XP 1700+ Upgrading to the kernel-2.6.17-1.2139_FC5 release caused the system to completely fail to continue booting; I got a long string of error messages that never get logged because the boot process past the grubbootloader never gets that far.commenting out the new kernel (or otherwise choosing the previous kernel-2.6.16-1.2133_FC5 release) returns the boot process to normal and I am able to get in just fine again. Rushed this one out, did we? :-)
My experience is just the opposite. 2.6.17 is the first kernel I can boot since 2.6.13.
Anyway, you need to log those kernel messages. Without them, there's little to go on.
Go get yourself an RS-232 null modem adapter, and connect the serial port on this machine to a serial port on another box. Run minicom on the other box, set it to 9600,8N1, and begin capturing.
Now, boot with "console=ttyS0,9600 console=tty0", and you'll get to capture all the kernel errors, in all their glory.
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