Installed new Q9550 CPU, now kernel won't boot [SOLVED]

platojones · Last edited by platojones on Tue Aug 26, 2008 11:53 am; edited 1 time in total

Have a strange one here. I just upgraded from an E6700 to a Q9550 (dual core to quad core) cpu on my perfectly functional Gentoo box..I moved the sound card to a different PCI slot as well, but those were the only changes I made to the system. Tried to boot the kernel, at it hangs at a line something like 'checking if filesystem is initramfs..it is', then nothing. The kernel image and initramfs were perfectly fine with the older E6700. Any ideas about what the problem might be or how I might work around this? Thanks.

poly_poly-man · Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2008 10:37 pm Post subject:

can you boot a linux livecd? how 'bout memtest86?

I once had a computer which had touchy pci slots... if you play with them at all, they break.
_________________
iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAA

avatar: new version of logo - see topic 838248. Potentially still a WiP.

platojones · Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2008 10:51 pm Post subject:

Yeah, gentoo install cd and windows xp (in dual boot) both boot just fine. This is a strange one.

sgao · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Apr 2006 Posts: 149

platojones · Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 4:40 am Post subject:

Yeah, I'm at the latest stable kernel now (gentoo sources 2.6.25-r7). Actually, the live cd does not boot...it just hangs at the gentoo.gz stage. The install cd does boot fine though and I am able to chroot from there and build new kernels. One thing I did do is get rid of the initramfs image, since I actually didn't have anything in there I needed to boot with (well, I had the intel SATA modules in there, so I just compiled them into the kernel). After I did that, it now hangs at 'freeing unused kernel memory". It says it's able to mount the root partition right before that happens.

platojones · Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 1:11 pm Post subject:

Just to follow up, this seems to be a hardware issue. The motherboard is acting generall flakey now, and doesn't boot consistly anymore. I'm afraid it has given up the ghost. Sigh!

poly_poly-man · Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 1:27 pm Post subject:

platojones · Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 2:20 pm Post subject:

Could be...it's really high-end 600W power supply, but those can go bad too I guess. It's about 18 months old. Been rock solid to this point. I suppose I can remove one of my 2 HDs and my PCI TV tuner card and see if that makes any difference. If so, that would definitely be it.

platojones · Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2008 11:57 am Post subject:

Ok, I'll just post a follow-up in case anyone get's stuck like this in the future. If your kernel get's stuck during boot at the 'Checking if image is initramfs', it almost certainly means a memory issue. In my case, I was lucky. When I installed the new CPU, it forced a large overclock on the FSB (which it was designed to do) and threw my memory frequency out of whack, resulting in the freeze. I suspected bad hardware, but all it required was careful tuning of the FSB and memory timings to get things working again (though this process too me a few days, arrrrggghhh). What can I say, I'm not an expert system tuner, though I have now learned a lot. System runs perfectly after I got that all sorted out.