boot-up hangs at multiple stages

[sonicsteve]

Ubuntu 8.10, This was not a problem in 8.04
During the boot process, just after the orange bar appears that bounces from side to side the system will pause. The only way I've found so far to unpause is by pressing and holding the spacebar. If I press the spacebar and release it will advance the boot process slightly but when I press and hold it the boot up continues as normal.

The happened during the boot up of the 8.10 live CD also, After all updates are done, even backports and proposed, the pause is still there.

I have a compaq presario f700 series laptop, and there are others with this same issue, see thread;
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=967679

The common link seems to be they are all HP/compaq laptops.

[amanison (amanison)]

This is not just an Ubuntu issue. I have a HP Pavilion dv9500z, and this problem during boot occurred with openSuse 11.1, and Centos 5.2 as well. Somewhere between 2.6.18 and 2.6.24 the problem appeared, I think. Something in the boot process is waiting for an event, and the keyboard press supplies the kick. The fact that it seems to occur throughout the first half of the boot may be significant, and it is a laptop issue. Maybe, as noted above, it's a Compaq/HP issue. I also get the "Clocksource tsc unstable" message, and the two issues seem to be related.

[lau (lbives)]

do you have the latest BIOS version installed on your system?

[sonicsteve (sonic-yfc)]

I checked with HP/Compaq. The BIOS is the most current. It doesn't mean that the problem isn't in the bios, it could mean that it needs to be updated and hasn't been. It really only means that it takes away the option to update as a possible fix. For the record my BIOS version is F.08

[sonicsteve (sonic-yfc)]

What do we need to do to help get this bug moving, honestly I'm mostly new to bug reporting.

[amanison (amanison)]

This has been documented on multiple HP laptops, on multiple recent distributions of Linux. It does not affect a single boot step, but is systemic throughout the boot process. Someone with a little more knowledge of the init process might be able to point in the right direction. There are enough user experiencing a problem for any fix to get broad testing.

[Daniel (socketspun)]

Indeed, hopefully we will see an update on this issue. Both me and my girlfriend are running Ubuntu on F700 and it would be nice to get an update for this issue. I'm sure the team will work it out sooner or later. Greetz!

[penalvch (penalvch)]

sonicsteve, thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu. Intrepid reached EOL on April 30, 2010.
See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Is this an issue in a supported release? If so, could you please execute the following command, as it will automatically gather debugging information, in a terminal:
apport-collect 330353

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for linux (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]