This is a little long but it's the best hardware trouble shooting process I know of. It's not only the motherboard that has BIOS on it. The Video, NIC, Sound, and other adapters have BIOS on them. The BIOS on these adapters communicates with the BIOS on the motherboard telling it what they are and what they need to work. It _"sounds like_" you have a BIOS on an adapter that is causing the machine to hang. In other words, object X tries to talk to object A and hangs the machine. However it's usually the line, following the last line you see, that hangs the machine. The objects could be hardware, software, or both. First; you will need a log book, write everything down. Look at the motherboard book and find out what order (direction) the slots enumerate in1,2,3, etc Obviously an AGP video card has it's own slot. Strip the machine of un-needed hardware. If it hangs on AGP you need to make a change in either the speed and/or memory of the AGP adapter in the motherboard BIOS. 2x, 4x, 8x speed reducing and try reducing the amount of memory it is allowed to use. <process> Boot if it works, shutdown Add 1 adapter Boot if it works, shutdown Add another adapter Boot and so on until something _doesn't_ work </process> Some adapters need to be in low order slots to work properly, start with sound, sound cards are notorious for causing problems. Then move on to Network, Modem, USB, Firewire, etc... if you have them. Put the sound card in the first slot. (slot 1 from the book) <process> Put the NIC in the next slot (slot 2 from the book) <process> and so on... If you find an adapter that fails after the NIC, move the NIC to the next to the last slot on the motherboard. (slot 5, on a 6 slot motherboard, and move the non-functioning adapter to slot 2) <process> If it works after that move on to the next adapter. If it doesn't then you know what hardware to replace. BIG HINT - don't close the case until it all works. On a different note, I've had W2K installs hang because the processor was over clocked. Slow down the processor if all else fails or if it hangs on AGP after changing its speed and memory. Good luck, write everything down, then share your findings with the TCLUGers. Sam. Shawn wrote: >On Sat, 20 Sep 2003 18:14:17 -0500 >Karl Bongers <kbongers at infinetivity.com> wrote: > > > >>What I said in my last post is only valid if the kernel >>is not starting. Try to take note if the kernel starts or not. >>Look for some message after "loading linux". >> >>Or try adding "vga=ask" as a boot-time parameter. If the >>kernel is starting, this should stop it very early and prompt for >>vga settings. >> >> >> > >Okay, finally got a chance to try and figure it out some more last night. Tried a few things, but didn't remove any hardware yet. Will try over the weekend. > >The last message that I was somewhat able to read after "loading linux" said something to the likes of "reading bios" or soemthing. If that's correct, and it's failing at trying to getinfo from the bios, what are my alternatives? Is there mainboards that are not Linux compatible? > > > > _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list