[CentOS] CentOS 4.2 hangs at power-on boot

[Bart Schaefer]

On 2/19/06, Bart Schaefer <barton.schaefer at gmail.com> wrote:
> However, leaving acpi alone and changing the timeout in grub.conf from
> 5 to 10 seconds (which I did for another reason -- the monitor wasn't
> coming on until the 5 seconds was already past) seems to have cleared
> it up.

Some more info in case it rings bells for anyone:

Early in the boot sequence, this message appears:

MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC

Googling seems to indicate that this is an old/known nForce problem,
has been patched for in recent kernels, and shouldn't be related.  Am
I wrong about that?

Later, during (?) kudzu hardware detection / just before pcmcia is
enabled, I get

FATAL: Module acpi not found

Nevertheless kuzdu says "OK" and the boot proceeds.

Finally (and this is clearly unrelated) smartd always fails to start.