Booting XO-1 with SD card occasionally hangs on I/O timeouts

[Hal Murray]

mikus at bga.com said:
> I can NEVER recall any incident where I could attribute "failure to  boot"
> to the SD card.  [Note that if an XO fails to boot, I normally  don't get to
> see the /var/log/messages from that boot attempt.]   My  experience with
> "failures to boot (after getting past OFW)" is that they  occur 10 out of 10
> times (not 1 out of 100). 

I think I've seen this once or twice before.

The errors are timeouts rather than data corruption.

I've been assuming it was some sort of problem in the handoff between OFW and 
the kernel and/or kernel initialization.  (That's just descriptive.  I don't 
have any data to back it up.)


"hangs during booting" may be misleading.  I've got a copy of 
/var/log/messages after that event.  I don't see any typical booting stuff.  
It all got kicked out of the dmesg buffer by timeout messages.

The first useful message is:
May  8 09:32:10 xo-0d-57-33 kernel: [11215.335626] ip_tables: (C) 2000-2006 
Netfilter Core Team
Then it goes off into NetworkManager.

The reason I noticed the problem is because the WiFi LED wasn't on.  The 
screen was dark, but poking the backlight-on key worked.



> My suggestion would be to try "repairing" (fsck?) the SD card.

It all works fine after I unplug and replug the SD card.

I've seen no hints that there is anything wrong on the card.

grep asdfasdfsadf . -r ran in a reasonable amount of time and didn't leave 
any complaints on screen or in /var/log/messages


-- 
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