I had the same problem with stock kernels hanging on bootup at the Real Time Clock driver step.
I had installed Debian Sarge using rc1 of the debian-installer. Machine is a Dell Dimension 4700 with a 3.0GHz HT P4. Installation went ok until rebooting for the first time into the newly installed Debian system. Hitting Control-C to skip the RTC driver and again to skip "Setting the Hardware clock to System clock" (or whatever) would allow booting but then on the initial base-setup the system would hang and no longer accept any keyboard input. Using the acpi=off option would get me past the RTC and "Setting the Hardware clock..." steps but then I got some IRQ 193 error, which said "No one cares". Finally found this web site: http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2004-November/023021.html This is just a workaround but it now allows me to boot Debian stock kernels with no problem. So far I've tried 2.6.8-1-686 and 2.6.8-1-686-smp. All files listed below were modified by adding a "--directisa" option to the hwclock command. The files and line numbers modified were: /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh lines 72, 104, 119 /etc/init.d/hwclockfirst.sh lines 62, 75, 77, 80, 82 /usr/sbin/tzsetup line 148 The /usr/sbin/tzsetup was what was causing the base-config to hang. Package versions installed for me now: ii util-linux 2.12-10 Miscellaneous system utilities ii base-config 2.53.4 Debian base system configurator ii kernel-image-2 2.6.8-10 Linux kernel image for version 2.6.8 on PPro # uname -a Linux sh-slchen 2.6.8-1-686-smp #1 SMP Thu Nov 25 04:55:00 UTC 2004 i686 GNU/Linux Hope that helps. I'm not sure if there is any other relevant information that is needed, if so please let me know. Swaine Chen slchen <at> users <dot> sourceforge <dot> net
