Laptop Powers Off During Boot [SOLVED]

[debellis]

I have an old HP Omnibook 6100 (P3-1000, 256 MB RAM) that I put TinyCore v 2.2 on. The problem is that it often (strangely not always) powers off during boot up. It doesn't happen at the same point in the process, and sometimes the bootup goes OK. I haven't been able to detect a rhyme or reason to this odd behavior. I've tried other distros (SystemRescue, Ubuntu) to make sure it isn't the machine. They boot up fine. I've also tried disabling all the power management options in the BIOS, and have fiddled with various boot flags, all to no avail. Has anyone else encountered this, and what did you do to fix it? I hate to have to keep hitting the power switch a dozen times just to use this thing!

[^thehatsrule^]

To clarify: at anytime during what seems to be a regular boot sequence, the machine powers off?  i.e. were there any error messages before it powers off?

Does this happen with TC 1.x?

[debellis]

Yeah, you have it right. The boot messages scroll by too quickly to get a sense of what it might be choking on. To reitierate, the point at which it powers off varies - sometimes it gets further than others, and sometimes (minority of times) the boot up does finish.

[^thehatsrule^]

If you do get through boot, taking a look at `dmesg` might show something.

[debellis]

OK, looks like I fixed the problem. Trolling on the web I found that some other Omnibook owners had run into the same problem. Seems the culprit is the intel_rng.ko module. By following the instructions in the wiki on building a custom kernel, I was able to make a new bzImage (on another machine) that does not attempt to load any of the hw_random modules. Moving this new bzImage over to the /boot directory, and renaming the stock tinycore bzImage to something else, has gotten me past this troublesome behavior. Now I can explore and enjoy tinycore!

[^thehatsrule^]

[Updated all post titles]

Glad to see you found a solution