On Mon, Jul 04, 2011 at 03:06:40PM +0200, Knut Petersen wrote:

Hi everybody!

An openSuse 11.2 system reliably refused to boot properly with kernel 2.6.38.8
although the prior 2.6.38.y kernels worked fine.  After a few seconds booting
stopped. Several <ctrl-c> did help, but a lot of services were not started properly,
only the root partition was available. Nothing unusual could be found in the
kernel messages.

I bisected the problem to commit 5fb46ae7b8c51b05a12c6a66108e8d398c20ee09.

That gave me the idea to disconnect the Plextor PX-755A dvd drive  and to
try 2.6.38.8 again. It booted without problem.

Does the 2.6.39.2 kernel work properly for you?