[SGVLUG] Boot hang fixed. Why did it happen.

[David Lawyer]

I installed a defective hard drive (HD) in my PC and it hung on
booting at: checking if image is initramfs... it is
The next step would have been freeing initrd memory.

You may say it's due to my defective HD but I booted off my regular HD
which always boots OK.  The problem I previously had with the
defective HD was not that there was any corruption on it, but that
after I replaced my power supply in my PC with a better one (from a
486 PC) the power would fail about every day or so until I removed
this HD.  I thought that this may be a power shutdown due to overload.  

It's not that I have too many devices drawing current since
substituting still another HD worked fine (except that my BIOS will
not recognize it since it's 40 GB even though the BIOS has an LBA
option which can address 4 TB --there are angry complaints about this
inferior BIOS on the internet).  But that's another story.

So I tried booting from the defective HD and it hung at the same
place.  I also tried a previous kernel version 2.6.21, and it hung at
the same place.  In addition, I found a few posts on the Internet
complaining about hanging at this same point.

So the obvious fix was to remove the defective HD.  But I still had the
same problem until about an hour later when it started working OK.  So
it's now fixed, but what was the cause?  It wasn't corruption of the
media, since it happened at the same place from booting from 3
different HD tracks (on 2 different HDs).  I tested memory and all that
could be freed for the test was OK.

I've filed a bug report on this.  Could it be due to race conditions
that happen because of slowness (or ?) due to degraded hardware?  It
seems like a combined hardware-software problem.

			David Lawyer