Saturday, April 11, 2009

Probelms with Fedora 10 on a Gericom Blockbuster 2

A Gericom ??? You ask me, if I'm sick ?
Well, someone bought it and just for standing around it's too bad.

I installed Fedora 10 on an external hard drive and with my PC and another notebook (it's a maxdata) it works without any problems. Well, how to boot Fedora change from PC to PC. Some can read the MBR on the external hard drive and load GRUB, other need GRUB on the internal hard drive to boot from the external drive.

Back to Gericom:
The BIOS have an option to boot from removable devices, but when I plug in my 1TB external drive, the BIOS hangs up. With smaller USB drives it works. BIOS update doesn't help.

So I searched for a boot manager, which is able to boot from usb. I found PLoP Boot Manager at http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html, which does the job.

The next problem:
Booting Fedora worked, X started, but suddenly no keyboard or mouse worked anymore. But the system was running. I know that because when I pressed the power off button, the shutdown dialog appeared. What the hell is going on ?

The make a long story short: After some tests, I figured out that the service irqbalance was the trouble maker. When the service is disabled, the system runs.

Start up with runlevel 2 (here is irqbalance disabled), run chkconfig --levels 345 irqbalance off to disable the service at the runlevels 3, 4 and 5.

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