Boot up freeze/sluggishness with ubuntu 6.06.1 install cd (on 64bit AMD hardware)
I thought I had written about this once before, but when I searched the site to find the solution I had come across before, I couldn’t find my post…. so, sorry if this is a duplication, but I’ve run into this on some AMD 64-bit based system boards. The most recent was based on the nvidia nforce4 chipset. Essentially in booting from either the alternative install cd or livecd for Ubuntu/kubuntu/edubuntu/xubuntu…. there is a freeze in the boot process. It goes for 30 seconds or more looking as though it’s hard frozen, but it does eventually manage to load the installer.
Within the installer though there seem to be issues finding hardware. (unable to find cdrom drive, asking to load driver from a disk…. among other things.)
Ultimately, I’ve found a few kernel options and a BIOS setting change that made a BIG difference and had the system booting up the cd VERY quickly and successfully finding hardware.
The long and short of it is to add the following kernel options….
acpi=off irqpoll
After this things MOSTLY worked, but I was still getting errors about devices not having irq’s assigned, so… I entered the BIOS and set Plug and Play OS to NO and then all seemed to be recognized with no complaints. I’m not sure if this is just ubuntu related, a specific kernel version, or support for the hardware, but I was glad to finally find a workable setup.
I should note, that the success happened with the 32-bit version of Ubuntu on this hardware. I recall testing the 64-bit version and having the same freeze on bootup though.
(The especially long freeze was at “mounting root file system”.) I haven’t tested with the 6.10 Edgy installer cd (in part because I wanted LTS on the system in question.)
BTW – another symptom of this problem was that when X came up the mouse was not used. The device had been detected correctly in /dev and was setup right in X, but the pointer wouldn’t budge at the login screen. After the above fixes, everything went well.