Hi Rosemary,
Okay - I tried this. At the "cd" it said "home not set" so I added "/" after looking down at the vi instructions - hope that was right, now thinking it should have been "~"! Anyway - rebooted and it stalled at ALSA again.
In windows explore2fs, now see only hda2, hda3 and hda6. In hda2 fstab.save shows this:
/dev/hda5 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hda9 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda6 /mnt ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-15,ro 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda7 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda8 swap swap defaults 0 0
Rosemary
Yes, it should have been "cd /" and not "cd". The reasion for that is so that your current directory is not inside the partition you are trying to unmount. Otherwise you would get a message about the partition being in use. While you could do a shutdown without unmounting the partition, and probably not have any problems, I like to play it safe when working remotely.
End result - we have a tempary fix for one source of trouble. But we still have the origional problem. The next step is to see if we can isolate it a bit. We have a couple of ways to go here. MOre then I had thought we would, because of the boot menu choice you use to boot the system. You have said that you are not using the "linux" entry to boot the system. Was there a problem where the system would not boot when you used that option?
Things to try:
Boot with the "linux-nonfb" option, and see if that makes a difference.
Try the I (interactive) option when booting, and do not start ALSA. Does the system boot then? This should give you a system without sound.
The hit I for interactive boot is displayed as part of the boot messages. If you normaly have the bootsplash screen with the progress bar showing when booting, you will have to hit the Esc key to see the messages. There is a fairly long period between when the message is displayed, and when you actualy enter the interactive mode. It does several things after displaying the message, before it reaches the decision point. (Display message, do other things while giving the user time to react, then check for user responce. No user timeout delay.)
If the system boots fine without ALSA starting, then we can work on getting ALSA fixed. If it doesn't, then we know the problem is elseware. From the way the problem apeared, I suspect that there may be an interupt sharing problem between the sound card and the USB interface, but this is just a guess at this point.
Mikkel --
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
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