User login hangs system

[Bill Davidson]

On Wed, 12 Mar 2003 15:57:41 -0800
"Net Llama!" <netllama at linux-sxs.org> wrote:

> On 03/11/03 18:17, Bill Davidson wrote:
> > I decided to give gentoo a try recently, and also decided to play
> > around with alsa. I couldn't get alsa working, but that's a problem
> > for another day. In trying to get the alsa modules to load, my
> > system would hang, taking out everything(keyboard, network),
> > requiring a manual reset. 
> > 
> > Now my system appears thoroughly hosed. It hangs just like above
> > when I try to log in as a user other than root. I tried removing the
> > user and adding it again, as well as adding a new user. I have no
> > problems with root. When I run a command, such as less somefile, the
> > screen fills up with junk, I get a message telling me to hit enter(I
> > forget the exact message). When I hit enter, the command executes as
> > normal.
> > 
> > One other thing. reiserfsck reports no filesystem corruption and
> > nothing shows up in my logs. Any ideas. I thought about recompiling
> > the bases system, but it doesn't seem to me that reinstalling
> > everything would be necessary.
> 
> so at no time was there any file system corruption?

It appears that way. I hesitate to say for sure, I could have missed it
when I booted, but like I said, there is nothing in my logs that would
indicate that fsck found anything wrong. I did, however forget to
mention this error I got the last time I ran lilo(yesterday).

Warning: Kernel & BIOS return differing head/sector geometries for
device 0x81    Kernel: 62749 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors
      BIOS: 1023 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors

Lilo still finishes and I'm still able to boot into my gentoo and
libranet system.