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I have a system that boots CentOS from a flash card. It reboots and comes up reliably 99+% of the time, but occaisionally it hangs at the Syslinux bootloader, right after it prints the Syslinux copyright message, but before it prints the "Loading vmlinuz" message.
Adding extra debug flags to the kernel boot line doesn't seem to help because when this happens, the kernel never actually gets loaded to produce any output.
Google serach shows others have experienced a similar problem, hanging at the syslinux copyright message, but very little information about how to figure out the cause of this or what is going on. Is there a way to turn on extra debug information for syslinux itself so I can get a better idea where/why it is failing?
Lintman
Posted 2013-08-02T18:03:04.460
Reputation: 1
I experienced this type of issue several times with some old hardware while booting from a USB HDD. I found that sometimes the HDD was slower than Syslinux (might have been Grub). This caused the boot loader to hang. Try to tell the boot loader to wait a couple of seconds before loading the kernel. – Mark Lopez – 2013-08-03T06:13:42.830
I tried it, but no luck. I think the hang is before it is able to open the configuration file, so any delays I put in there are never seen. – Lintman – 2013-08-07T14:21:59.110