SUSE 11.1 won't boot unless mouse/keys are constantly pressed

[NicholasR]

Title is pretty self-explanatory. Suse 11.1 will not boot (or shutdown) past a certain point unless I constantly move the mouse around or press keys.

Computer is an HP pavilion dv6000.

What could cause this?

[meton_magis]

I've never heard of this before. Perhaps the server is using the random number generator a lot durring boot. The RNG is loaded with entropy by looking at mouse movement and keyboard presses. If the /dev/random char file has nothing loaded, the process will hang until it has enough characters

[NicholasR]

So, basically your saying the random number generator is seeded with keypresses/mouse movement and thats hanging it...

I don't think thats the problem, because if I stop pressing keys/moving mouse while it is loading, it ceases loading until I keep doing it (until it reaches a certain point).

[meton_magis]

not quite. the random number generator takes the movement from the mouse and keyboard to create entropy (randomness) to create a bunch of random numbers. It then loads it to a pseudo device, /dev/random (or is it /dev/urandom ??) The applications then take data from /dev/random to get easy random numbers. If you dont move your mouse / keyboard a bunch, no random numbers are generated, and the applications hang.

what you are describing is completely indicative of what i'm talking about. I dont know suse, so I dont know what kind of software it loads by default, but if it is relying on the entropy from the mouse and keyboard for the RNG, that is EXACTLY what it would look like. Unless some timeout is programed into the application, it will wait all day for a random number.

Again though, this is a guess. I'm a redhat / gentoo guy, I dont know much about Suse, so it could be something else. Have you tried searching suse's bugzilla (or whatever bug app they use) ?

[D-cat]

You don't happen to be using a USB keyboard are you? I had a similar problem where, the computer would eventually boot after being stuck for several minutes, when the only devices plugged in were USB. Now using a classic PS/2 keyboard, boots like lightening.

[NicholasR]

It is a laptop. Moving a USB mouse won't do anything I have to move the touchpad around or press keys. Also it will timeout eventually and continue booting, although it doesn't do that on shutdown and will drain batteries to 0 if I don't hold its hand through shutting down.

[meton_magis]

have you tried any other distro? I'd try using some live spins and see if any repeat this.

[njuguna]

Well, it always helps to know for how long it has been behaving that way. Sounds to me like there is a hardware malfunction(possibly a keyboard keys are damaged, have dirt under them), or the O.S. I've never had such a problem neither used 11.1 but If the previous diagnosis you were given were different, then it's high time you look at the above suggestions.

[blinky]

I had something similar on one of my machines with early Fedora 7 or 8 (sometime in 2007 - it was a while ago can't remember which) on i386 (the x64 distribution was fine).

On mine it was always on the bootup/shutdown part and always ok once X had started. Never found out what was causing it, it stopped by itself after a few fedora kernel updates had been released/applied.

[njuguna]

A bug in the system? I don't get it...why affect bootup and/or halt instructions? Would such a problem, from my view, start immediately after GNU installation?
If not, what would make the workstation behave the way yours and NicholasR's did?