laptop sometimes hangs at boot

At this point keyboard doesn't respond, I have to hard power off the laptop.

It happened again.

Hi Juan,

Can you try disabling wireless prior to booting (I assume you have some sort of kill switch you can flip). I see you have the iwl3945 wireless driver and noticed a similar bug report (bug 263059) which this may be a duplicate of. Please let us know your results. Thanks.

It's highly probable that this is related to the iwl3945 driver.
Unfortunately, I've experienced this bug even with the RF kill switch enabled (probably because it's still loading iwl3945). I was able to boot by disabling wireless in BIOS config (so the driver is not loaded).

I'm not sure if it always works, but I've been able to boot normally with wireless enabled by booting in recovery mode and then choosing "resume" to continue normal boot.

How is the result on 2.6.27-rc3 kernel? We did some testing for 2.6.27-rc3(iwl3945 1.2.26kds) kernel on laptop T60 and didn't get this issue. And also please try this new 3945 uCode from http://www.intellinuxwireless.org/iwlwifi/downloads/iwlwifi-3945-ucode-15.28.1.6.tgz in your testing.

And does iwl3945 work by "modprobe iwl3945" manually after booting into system with wireless disabled.

Yingying, I'm still SOMETIMES experiencing this bug using the uCode you suggested.

Hi Juan,

Have you been able to test the newer 2.6.27-3 Ubuntu kernel and does that help? Thanks.

Oops, just saw Juan's comment in bug 263059 - "2.6.27-3 still fails to boot sometimes for me." . Juan, are the failures you sometimes see the same as the initial images you originally attached? Thanks.

I'm attaching an image taken today where the laptop is frozen.

snifer@snifer-laptop:~$ uname -a
Linux snifer-laptop 2.6.27-3-generic #1 SMP Wed Sep 10 16:02:00 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

I can confirm what Juan Pablo says.
Sometimes my laptop is frozen between the lines:
[ ] iwl3945: Detected Intel Wireless WiFi Link 3945ABG
...
[ ] Synaptics Touchpad, model: 1, fw: 6.1, id: 0xa3a0b3, caps: 0xa04713/0x10008

Linux portatil 2.6.27-3-generic #1 SMP Wed Sep 10 16:02:00 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

Info provided. If you need more info please let us know.

Also happens to me. In a Dell XPS M1210 with latest kernel 2.6.27-4

Sep 23 20:00:54 bean kernel: [ 1840.989326] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready
Sep 23 20:01:05 bean kernel: [ 1851.337020] eth0: no IPv6 routers present
Sep 23 20:31:26 bean kernel: [ 3672.614155] iwl3945 0000:0c:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
Sep 23 20:31:26 bean kernel: [ 3672.614356] iwl3945 0000:0c:00.0: restoring config space at offset 0x1 (was 0x100102, writing 0x100106)
Sep 23 20:31:26 bean kernel: [ 3672.618718] iwl3945: Radio disabled by HW RF Kill switch
Sep 23 20:31:26 bean kernel: [ 3672.620160] iwl3945 0000:0c:00.0: PCI INT A disabled
Sep 23 20:31:26 bean kernel: [ 3672.621703] iwl3945 0000:0c:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
Sep 23 20:31:26 bean kernel: [ 3672.621872] iwl3945 0000:0c:00.0: restoring config space at offset 0x1 (was 0x100102, writing 0x100106)
Sep 23 20:31:26 bean kernel: [ 3672.626117] iwl3945: Radio disabled by HW RF Kill switch
Sep 23 20:31:26 bean kernel: [ 3672.627495] iwl3945 0000:0c:00.0: PCI INT A disabled
Sep 23 20:32:19 bean kernel: [ 3725.337409] ip6_tables: (C) 2000-2006 Netfilter Core Team
Sep 23 20:32:34 bean kernel: [ 3740.309399] iwl3945 0000:0c:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
Sep 23 20:32:34 bean kernel: [ 3740.309573] iwl3945 0000:0c:00.0: restoring config space at offset 0x1 (was 0x100102, writing 0x100106)
Sep 23 20:32:34 bean kernel: [ 3740.310572] iwl3945: Radio disabled by HW RF Kill switch
Sep 23 20:32:34 bean kernel: [ 3740.311873] iwl3945 0000:0c:00.0: PCI INT A disabled

and halt here

If you need some more info ask for it.

Any update on this.. I have the same problem for a while now, and it is quite a pain to have to be at my laptop to disable the radio before I shutdown or while booting up each time.. Still experiencing on 2.6.27-6-generic...

Thanks