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Introduction

I booted up my computer as usual, which is dual-booted with Debian 9 and Windows 10.

The problem

As soon as I entered my Debian partition I received an error message, which hangs and doesn't allow me to boot into my Debian partition.

Error message

My attempts

I deleted the Debian partition and installed Ubuntu to make sure if it was an issue with Debian kernel itself, as suspected Ubuntu partition is bootable and functions correctly.

I then attempted to Install Debian 8, which installed successfully and booted without problems. I then upgraded to Debian 9 rebooted my PC and received the same error again and hangs, unable to boot. I also installed Debian testing, and received the same error on boot.

What is this error? What does it mean, and how would I go about fixing this?

NOTE: the error still appears with DE installed but still boots

  • Works when I install with a desktop environment

  • Doesn't work and hangs at the error when I don't install a desktop environment (the latter is what I want)

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  • You have completely misdiagnosed your problem. The last message on the screen is not necessarily the cause of a boot problem like this, at all. (On AskUbuntu, this is a much-repeated misdiagnosis.) You need to ensure that your system even has the bootstrap goal of bringing up a TUI login on your first KVT, read your logs to find out how far your system had got through the bootstrap and what it was trying to do at that point, boot your system in verbose mode so that a lot more is logged, and make a question based upon those. Commented Jan 14, 2018 at 9:19

1 Answer 1

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The sp5100_tco error means that the watchdog driver for the AMD SB700 and SB800 series chipsets cannot load because the watchdog's I/O address is already in use. Unless you've actively using the watchdog, this error should not halt the boot process.

If you suspect the module, you could blacklist it with a boot option modprobe.blacklist=sp5100_tco on an already-installed system, or sp5100_tco.blacklist=yes when running the Debian installer.

You might also edit the boot options in the GRUB bootloader to remove the default boot option quiet to see more boot messages. Those would give you a more complete picture about where the boot process hangs and what things it has completed successfully before hanging.

For example, it would be important to know if /dev/sda5 is your Debian root partition or not: if contains the root filesystem, the hang might happen while the system is still on initramfs or transitioning from it to the real root filesystem. If /dev/sda5 is some other filesystem, the system is quite a bit further along in the boot process and different troubleshooting methods would be called for.

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  • I feel a bit overwhelmed here, will give it a shot, Debian with no desktop environment hangs on this error. Debian +xfce works however seems to launch it's gui and be fine. I'm at my wits end, would wiping the entire hdd stop this error from appearing ? Commented Jan 13, 2018 at 22:34
  • I've blacklisted it. However even though the error message doesn't appear, it still hangs. Commented Jan 14, 2018 at 0:00
  • Then the error message was unrelated to the cause of the hang, and you'll need to get more information. When you edit the boot options in GRUB, option quiet should be already there by default. Remove it to see more boot messages. Commented Jan 14, 2018 at 11:07

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