Hardware detection

A

arkamw

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 5, 2004
Messages
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I have looked around a little bit on the web for the answers but have, thus far, not come up with much. What I am needing is a way to skip part of the startup hardware detection.

I am running Fedorc Core 2. After detecting which kernel I want to run (I always choose the latest) it goes into the hardware detect routine which works great until it gets to my SATA controller. It will then test each controller looking for a drive that isn't there. This will take something like 3 minutes until it determines something isn't there and goes about things normally.

My first thought was to disable this in BIOS but there isn't a choice to nor is there a jumper on the motherboard (Intel D845PEBT2 if anyone wants to double-check me). I suppose that I could go out and buy two SATA drives, but that won't work either. Is there a way to get Linux to STOP looking for the drives on that controller or just stop the hardware detect altogether.

Is this even feasible or possible? Would I have to compile a new kernel (not looking forward to that)? Any info would be great.

Cheers.
 
at a terminal type in 'setup' go down to services, then scroll down and disable kudzu. kudzu is the hardware detection program that starts at startup.

if that doesnt work, goto a terminal and type in 'chkconfig --level 12345 kudzu off'. this will disable kudzu from starting on all runlevels.
 
Great, I'll give that a try. Does it have to run every time (i.e., will Linux fail to run if Kudzu isn't running?). I am supposing that I would have to re-enable it should I ever change hardware?

Cheers.
 
no, linux will run fine without kudzu, and if you ever add a device and wish to run it, just goto a terminal and type kudzu
 
Well, I would have loved to have said that worked. But, it didn't. I am beginning to think that the problem that I am having is before Kudzu comes along (i.e. before the run levels).

This is just right after the kernel is chosen. I have three kernels on my machine (for whatever reason) and I always choose the latest one, though this problem happens in all three. The screen comes up that gives the boot device, the "ro root=label=/ rhgb quiet" line, and then an image file line. After that, a few lines further down, it says "uncompressing Linux, audit (xxxxxx lots of numbers)." If I take out the quiet part of the ro line, then I get to see it going through looking at a bunch of hardware and hanging on the SATA controller looking for drives.

It'll take a while to get through this, usually two or three minutes. And while I am patient (evidence to the contrary) it is kind of obnoxious that I have to go through this.

Any suggestions on how to get it to NOT look for those SATA drives? Is there a startup script somewhere that looks for hardware?

Cheers.
 
Well, bugzilla report 122166 appears to have some nfo related to this. I will give this a shot and see what happens. I will probably ask next how to add this as default to the command line.

Cheers.
 
OK. It worked! No more really long boot times, just somewhat long boot times. But livable. Also figured out that the grub.conf file in the /boot/grub/ directory contains all the default boot arguments (and extraneous kernels) much like the 2k boot.ini file.

Fun stuff.

Cheers.
 
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