Topic: 7P1 system hangs at haldeamon

[electroman00]

Hi

Anyone having problems with systems hanging when haldeamon loads
on startup v7pre1.
I mean it just locks the system up good. Reset button only.

This has been a problem with some PII/PIII systems I have.

Have not found a solution as of yet though, thought it might be memory,
I have ruled that out mostly after some testing 20 diff modules.

Base memory is 256mb.

Might be motherboard, not sure at this point, have 9 systems with same
MB and they all halt at haldeamon on startup.

Really weired....

Mind you these were running v6.01, yea I know whole new ball game with
SME v7.

Bios is also up to date, for this vintage that is.

Also this has been a problem with the v7 stream.

Have a dell 1.7gig machine doing same thing. Runs v6 just fine.

I have a bunch of hocky pucks of v7 sme burned with good mdsum.

At a loss at this point.

Hal is Hardware Application Layer deamon, doesn't give any errors, just a nice lock up.

[electroman00]

Well long days and nights I think I found the problem.
Video and Memory modules.
Funny thing is SME v6 was running fine.
Seems that the v7 stream is a bit more sensitive to old hardware.
true statment.....
If SME v6.x was running on your machine just fine, that doesn't mean
SME v7.x will run just fine with your hardware.
The two most likely candidates for failure with v7 are Video and Memory modules.
Look at/for
Video Cards that didn't follow any standards when the were mfg'ed ie.
most all of the S3 cards I tested failed but not all.

Memory modules with incorrect/incomplete SPD programming.
SPD - Serial Presence Detect

A tool to help with that can be found ..... google "SPD-tool" a DOS pgm.

Most all hardware these days have a spd chip on them which is a eeprom
that stores the cards type/setup.

It's a little 8 pin chip somewhere on the card or board.

If your hardware doesn't report it's configuration to the system and it's on
the buss then you may very well have some problems with the system
starting up and/or running.

Take my word for it, just because that little chip is on the board doen't
mean that the hardware will work, it may very well be programmed by the
MFG. incorrectly or programmed correctly and the config will not
work with everything you have bundled in the system together.
I my case it was old hardware, upgraded bios and new software ie. SME v7.
Old hardware video cards & memory, upgraded bios all worked dandy
with SME v6........then came the software upgrade v7.
All my systems would lock up during/after haldeamon loaded.
I installed half dozen different video cards before it fired up.
The real clue was when I installed a Nvidia 32mb PCI and it fired up.
Not that I think I need it in a SME that I very rarely use the text console
that needs about 512kb of video.
There was one 2mb S3 video card that is working at this time.

BTW these were (9) PIII 550mhz SBC mobo 100FSB 256mb industrial rack mount PC's.
Working like a charm w/v7.

[CharlieBrady]

Anyone having problems with systems hanging when haldeamon loads
on startup v7pre1.

There are links to the bug tracker at the left. Please report your experiences there.

[electroman00]

Charlie

I didn't put it in the bug tracker because I don't think depreciated hardware
can be considered a software bug.

Just old and incompatible hardware.

IMO it wounldn't make sense to support hardware that is not compliant
to newer standards.

If you still feel it needs to be in the tracker I will add it.