Mageia forum

For some time now I'm unable to get into my Mageia installation. Sometime during booting it just hangs.
See a screenshot here.

Any idea what's wrong? How can I diagnose/fix the problem?

At that point, can you switch to another tty via Ctrl+Alt+F2 and login as your user or as root?
Can you attach the output of journalctl -ab and /var/log/Xorg.0.log?

What graphics card and driver do you use, what is selected in drakx11 ?

Problem solved! It was a problem with the video driver.

It never occurred to me that the system booted far enough to switch to another tty. So I did.
From 'journalctl -ab' I learned that it was a display issue and more details I found in /var/log/Xorg.0.log.
I have an ATI Radeon HD 5870 card I think the DKMS module wasn't loaded correctly.
After several attempts to selecting the 'radeon/fglrx' driver and drakx11 crashing it seems the module was compiled eventually.
After a reboot the system came up as expected.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

nickdegraeve wrote:It never occurred to me that the system booted far enough to switch to another tty. So I did.

Unfortunately it happens pretty often that systems occur to "hang" during booting. What actually happens is that usually in the background the Xserver had already started, failed for whatever reason but the special handler is not shown. Usually you should get some "Oh noes, something went wrong starting the X server" black text dialog which provides your with some more details on how to troubleshoot this.
Although from memory, over the years I've only seen that in 5 out of 100 cases (rough estimation).

Now you know - always try to switch to another tty and see from there how far the boot process actually got ... glad I could help.

doktor5000 wrote:Usually you should get some "Oh noes, something went wrong starting the X server" black text dialog which provides your with some more details on how to troubleshoot this.

FWIW, see the third screenshot in viewtopic.php?f=15&t=11188 which is the handler that I meant, so at least you see what it looks like - which is the screen you should have been getting, instead of the "hang".