Freshly installed system hangs on boot

[nac.est]

I've just installed Ubuntu 10.04 netbook remix on an acer Aspire One D250, specs below:
Processor Name: Intel Atom N270
Processor Speed: 1.6 GHz
RAM: 1 GB
Graphics Card: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950
Storage Capacity: 160 GB

I had to resize the win partition, making a new partition for Ubuntu of about 15GB. I then installed the system. Everything went without problems.
I was able to boot once, and verified that everything worked as intented.

However, after that, 90% of the times I reboot the bootup process hangs at a blank screen (with a blinking underscore), immediately after grub selection.
If I select "recovery mode" in grub I can see the bootup messages, but the process hangs, all except one time, right after:

[2.304418] ata2: DUMMY
[2.304487] ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m1024@0x58344000 port 0x58344200 irq28
[2.304584] ata4: DUMMY

and does nothing more. There are no error messages or hints to the source of the problem, to my eyes.
I've noticed that sometimes even the loading screen of the live cd will hang indefinitely, leaving me no choice other than a hard-reboot.

The rare times that the system does boot normally, everything works normally.
I've tried installing using both the ext4 and ext3 filesystems.

I couldn't find anything like this on the forums. Am I doing something wrong?
Do you need more details?

[fleder]

Same here with HP Compaq Mini 110c - the hardware specs are exactly the same.

I stuck to ext2 for a separate /boot partition and ext3 for the system root (/).
Also, there is a Windows XP Professional installation alongside.

[       1.272502] ata4: DUMMY

is the last line it is displaying.

Ubuntu 10.04 i386 Netbook Remix

[fleder]

I managed to get it boot up once by switching it off, taking out the battery, putting it back in, hooking the netbook up to the power supply and plugging in the LAN connection I used for installing Ubuntu (regular GRUB boot option).

When I was in the lucky situation to have a running system I took advantage to do both "sudo aptitude update" and "sudo aptitude full-upgrade" and install the proprietary Broadcom WLAN device driver.

Since then it has been starting up reliably.

[hnavag73]

I managed to get it boot up once by switching it off, taking out the battery, putting it back in, hooking the netbook up to the power supply and plugging in the LAN connection I used for installing Ubuntu (regular GRUB boot option).

When I was in the lucky situation to have a running system I took advantage to do both "sudo aptitude update" and "sudo aptitude full-upgrade" and install the proprietary Broadcom WLAN device driver.

Since then it has been starting up reliably.

I did that with my Aspire One D250 and it did the update & upgrade, but after doing the required restart it didn't boot it just showed the blank screen with the blinking cursor... anyone has another solution???

[nac.est]

Sorry for the late update, but I may have found a solution/workaround.
If you add the "nolapic" kernel option to the bootup script, the system does boot (almost) normally. The only glitch is that it takes a few seconds more than I'd expect and it very briefly displays a couple of warning/error messages that I can't read. After that, however, everything is fine.

For instructions on how to add the option, see this thread. I simply added nolapic inside the quotes after GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub, and ran sudo update-grub.

Unfortunately I'm not knowledgeable about kernels and their options, so I'm not totally confident the consequences of adding nolapic.

[yonagi]

Sorry for the late update, but I may have found a solution/workaround.
If you add the "nolapic" kernel option to the bootup script, the system does boot (almost) normally.

I just installed 10.04 UNR on my Gateway LT2030u and had the same issue on reboot. This netbook uses the same processor and graphics card with the same amount of RAM. I managed to finally get into the installation to add "nolapic" as you recommended. Five test reboots later, and I've yet to see any issues. Unfortunately, I'm also not certain what "nolapic" does, so I've got something to Google later today!

[hnavag73]

finally got the booting sorted out with this:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

add it to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash hpet=force nolapic"

save the file then run

sudo update-grub

[visionjinx]

I've just installed Ubuntu 10.04 netbook remix on an acer Aspire One D250, specs below:
Processor Name: Intel Atom N270
Processor Speed: 1.6 GHz
RAM: 1 GB
Graphics Card: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950
Storage Capacity: 160 GB

I had to resize the win partition, making a new partition for Ubuntu of about 15GB. I then installed the system. Everything went without problems.
I was able to boot once, and verified that everything worked as intented.

However, after that, 90% of the times I reboot the bootup process hangs at a blank screen (with a blinking underscore), immediately after grub selection.
If I select "recovery mode" in grub I can see the bootup messages, but the process hangs, all except one time, right after:

[2.304418] ata2: DUMMY
[2.304487] ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m1024@0x58344000 port 0x58344200 irq28
[2.304584] ata4: DUMMY

and does nothing more. There are no error messages or hints to the source of the problem, to my eyes.
I've noticed that sometimes even the loading screen of the live cd will hang indefinitely, leaving me no choice other than a hard-reboot.

The rare times that the system does boot normally, everything works normally.
I've tried installing using both the ext4 and ext3 filesystems.

I couldn't find anything like this on the forums. Am I doing something wrong?
Do you need more details?

Hi Group, I am new to this forum (first post infact) and wanted to add to this also as I had the very same experience.

I tried the live version first and all seemed to be OK, so I installed it and same issue as the original poster.

I just got a blank screen with a flashing cursor, I could get it to boot very rarely (about the same 90% failure) and when digging I got the same thing as well, things seemed to hang at

ata4: DUMMY

I even had quite a few issues trying to get into the recovery mode when presented with the boot options (trying to get to a basic root command line I could use).

Just wanted to add to this post as I am having the same issues as well and hope the Ubuntu team can find the issue and get a fix out for what ever is causing this. I am not new to linux (CentOS/RHEL is mainly what I work with) but am pretty new to Ubuntu, although I had installed and played with some of the earlier versions a bit.

Some info on my system:

I just installed Ubuntu 10.04 netbook edition on my Compaq Mini (Compaq Mini CQ10) and it has basically the same specs as the original poster, I have it dual boot with the WIndows XP Home version that it came with (just incase I needed to revert to it for whatever reason, but do prefer linux most definitely, which is why I am trying this distro out)

I tried the suggestions posted here and it did seem to boot although I am not sure if this is a fix for the issue or if it will resurface again. (Haven't played with it long enough to know yet)

When I did get it first booted before (although it did hang when first rebooting after install) I did do the updates immediately so am not sure if there was something in there or what that caused this.

I plan on installing the desktop release a bit later today (on a desktop system) so hopefully I wont have this issue again and it's just restricted to netbooks. This version does look pretty cool though so am pretty stoked to give it a go!

Thanks for your time!
Vision Jinx

[Hippy Tesla]

MY SOLUTION THAT WORKED:

I had the same problem after installing 10.04 on my netbook a few hours ago. Then I read this thread, and tried things you guys posted, but nothing happenned. Just the black screen with a blinking cursos, or in diagnostic mode "ata 4 DUMMY" error.

Then I disabled my wireless adapter as a boot device from BIOS (the adapter is Broadcom 43xx), and it booted. Although it couldn't detect my home wireless SSID (the wireless LED is blue, which means it's enabled and drivers are loaded), I connected the LAN cable and ran the complete system update. It's still downloading, so I'll let you know if that completely fixes the problem

This adapter had problems with Windows XP (for some reason recognised by Ubuntu and PartitionMagic 8.0 as Windows Vista) until I updated its driver for two times, until it worked.

[spotted zebra]

finally got the booting sorted out with this:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

add it to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash hpet=force nolapic"

save the file then run

sudo update-grub

thanks so much for this it worked perfectly.

a word to anyone getting frustrated just keep turning it off and on until your system boots. i had to do it about 15 times before it got one to take. after that is it is a small amount of code editing and you are home free.

does anyone know how to speed up the boot at all. this snippet of code really seems to slow it down. i am not complaining because it works now but i would like to optimize my system.

thanks again to all. do i hear a sticky for this thread in solving the problem?????

one last thing can someone point me to where it explains what this code means? i can do things blindly but i would like to have a basic understanding of what i did.