[ltp] Z61t fails to boot

Fredrik Wendt linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Fri, 16 Mar 2007 23:57:59 +0100


Hi.

I've been sitting here for about two hours continually rebooting and
crossing my fingers, hoping for Ubuntu to boot up normally. I thought it
had something to do with hibernation to do, since I just recently got
that working (didn't work out of the box with Ubuntu Edgy I'm afraid).
What actually did cause my temporary misery was the fact that I had
turned the switch off, that disables/enables the wireless network card.

The error message I got was something like
        BUG: Caused soft lockup on CPU#0
and I guess that's what actually made the computer just hang and do
nothing (at least once I let it stand and do nothing for at least 30
minutes) except reboot when I pressed Ctrl+Alt+Delete (and sometimes not
even that).

(Windows booted without problem, actually the first time I booted Win XP
after the first installation process.)

Now that I tried to reproduce the situation, it boots without errors. It
just states that the wireless network card won't work while the radio
switch is on (disabled):

        ipw3945: Radio Frequency Kill Switch is On:
        Kill switch must be turned off for wireless networking to work.

Really weird.

Well, the reason for this post was just to share the advice/info - if
you ever get the situation where you see this CPU lockup/hang, make sure
the radio frequency kill switch is off.

/
	Fredrik

PS. The kernel used is Ubuntu Edgy standard (head of dmesg):
        Linux version 2.6.17-11-generic (root@terranova) (gcc version
        4.1.2 20060928 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.1.1-13ubuntu5)) #2 SMP Thu
        Feb 1 19:52:28 UTC 2007 (Ubuntu 2.6.17-11.35-generic)
Dumps from lspci, lshw, typical dmesg from normal startup are located at
http://wendt.se/software/linux/Z61t/ and my machine is a Lenovo ThinkPad
Z61t (9443-4GG), and most of the time it just works as expected. DS