If I used an external hard drive on my notebook (with USB 2) in the last session of Gentoo Linux, my system refuses sometimes to boot. Init hangs at the step "Checking root filesystem". After rebooting the computer again, the system starts correctly most times. It makes no difference whether I unmount the hard drive before shutting down the system or not. This problem doesn't occurs every time, but it occurs since I use this external hard drive and it seems never to occur if I don't switch the drive on in the last session. The system is still responsive, but it seems to wait for something. The external hard drive is formated to ext3 an mounted to /mnt/usb. Reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. Using an external hard drive 2. Rebooting the computer Actual Results: The system hangs during "Checking root filesystem"
are you sure it's doing nothing ? try doing `ctrl+c` or enable magic sysrq and query the system state
No it does not react on CTRL+C and other keys. However the keyboard seems still to be active (I can change the status light of the Caps-Lock key).
you should enable usb debugging in the kernel to see if transactions are going on there
