skill level: newbie :]

running 8.1 default kernel, just installed it.

when i first boot, the pc hangs at "Setting system time from the hardware clock (localtime)", even if i leave it an hour.

tried ctrl-c putting the system into RL3 but when i shutdown a similar line appears and the system hangs completely.

what steps should i take, or what information should i attempt to glean to progress?

i've tried 2 clean reinstalls and have run the 8.1 cd a few times trying setting the time to UTC or non UTC with timezone Europe/London.

Funnily enough, slackware was working fine yesterday when i first installed it, I decided to reinstall because i'd missed a lot of libs so i unchecked anything to do with X/Gnome/KDE (apart from the libs ;] ) then did a full installation so as not to miss anything.

amd 1200 TBird
900Mb PC133
Asus A7A266
Maxtor 1.5gig / 300mb, /usr 1200mb, /swp 128mb + a Maxtor 80gig IDE /var 400mb, /swp 128mb, /archive 79gig, /home 200mb on hda and hdb
Panasonic 4x DVD on hdc
RTL8139C network
ATI Radeon VE gfx

Well, this really doesn't solve the problem but it might provide at least a quick work around to allow the system to boot and provide info if it is the hwclock program to fault. Boot your install CD as normal. Mount your root partition under say /mnt.
Then "chmod 000 /mnt/sbin/hwclock" and unmount the partition. Then reboot, turn off or reset the PC. If the hwclock program was to be faulted then the system should boot back up.

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt
chmod 000 /mnt/sbin/hwclock
umount /mnt

Substitute hda1 for your root partition.

Personally, I have not seen a system where it causes the system to hang. However, there is a remark in the files (rc.0, rc.S, and rc.6) about SGI Visual Workstation that it could lock up. So there is some history there. Perhaps common clock chip or something.

i mounted /dev/hda1 to /mnt and couldn't find hwclock. odd no?

checked the /usr partition with whereis for any mention with no success.

I think the key would be what is your root partition? I used the wrong word in my prior post. It should of been "with" instead of "for" in the substitute directions for hda1. If you used multiple partitions, then try all of them if not sure. But the hwclock program is installed the /sbin directory. That should always be on the root partition.

The next process after the hwclock are the modules. So you might want to also do

chmod 000 /mnt/etc/rc.d/rc.modules

The last thing the rc.S script does after the modules is it inits the urandom device.

When the rc.M script starts it echos the messages "Going multiuser" and that should be just after the clock message I believe.

reinstalled with a large (1500meg) / partition and no /usr partition.

success.

thx for help.

It sounds like it was missing libraries but I would of thought an error message would of been displayed but not lock up the system.

Glad to hear you are well on your way again.