Comment 6 for bug 274155

I have identical symptoms with Intrepid Beta.

The boot almost always stops at 1/5 through progress bar. It does not recover from this and I have to hold the power button on my laptop.

I was convinced that it did it every time but once I did enough boots I discovered that occasionally it will make it through booting fine on it's own.

When I remove the "quiet splash" kernel option it boots fine most times - there appears to be a positive effect in removing these options.

But in my case at least, that is not the whole story, because if I keep rebooting it will occasionally fail in apparently the same manner (though there is no progress bar of course the timing, CPU and HDD activity dying down are the same). In these situations it normally does so at "loading hardware drivers" exactly as Pajari and Guo Xi have stated above.

In the same vein it will also sometimes fail when booting into recovery mode (which has no splash screen anyway).
When booting into recovery mode the failure instead seems to occur after the line:
     iwl3945: Tunable channels: 13 802.11bg, 23 802.11a channels

It took many boots to discover that the "quiet splash" fix did not fix the problem 100% of the time, but I wonder if that fix is a red herring.

My hardware is a Dell Inspiron 9400. It has Intel 3945ABG wireless using iwl3945 driver, Intel 945GM graphics, and Intel Core Duo CPU.