NST Boot FAQ

Boot Issues

Potential reasons why the NST probe may hang at the "Starting udev" stage?

Floppy Kernel Module Driver

We have encountered systems like a Dell Inspiron 8200 that seem to hang for a long time during the boot process. These systems do eventually boot, but may take a minute or more to get past the Starting udev stage of the boot process.

The problem appears to be related to the floppy kernel module being loaded when the BIOS is set to indicate that there is no floppy drive installed. We're not sure whether the problem is related to the udev system, the kernel, the BIOS implementation or some sort of combination of these.

You can avoid this problem on a hard disk installation or a Live USB boot that has a persistence layer available by black listing the floppy module:

echo "blacklist floppy" >| /etc/modprobe.d/floppy.conf

Since floppy disk drives are seldom found in current systems, we may decide to black list the floppy driver by default in future versions of the NST.

Network Interface Card (NIC) Adapter Order

We have seen that in systems with multiple NIC adapters that the defined adapters in the "/etc/70-persistent-net.rules" may not agree with the "udev" detected values at boot time. If this occurs, the NST probe may take a minute or more to get past the Starting udev stage of the boot process.

You can check the NIC adapter order detected by "udev" during the boot stage by using the "dmesg" system utility:

 dmesg | less

If a detected NIC adapter is out of order you will see this by lines starting with: "udev: renamed network interface". We have been successful at correcting this problem by manually editing the "/etc/70-persistent-net.rules" and correcting the NIC adapter order.