Thanks Chris and Mikus for the replies. Well, I seem to have close down on the cause; but not close enough :( The solution is still not in sight. I have been making some changes in the sugar-code, to have the "Transfer to Many" feature working. Things work fine on sugar-emulator; however, when I replace the files in "src/jarabe/journal" folder on the XO, I fail to get the XO booting. Now, the code is fairly big in amount; and it will take many days to pin-point the issue (without any "log" info). But one thing is sure, only when the files in "src/jarabe/journal" are updated, does the XO fail to boot. I tried one thing - I removed the directory "/home/olpc/.sugar", and rebooted, but the XO still failed to boot. One thing I did notice, is that on reboot, the directory "/home/olpc/.sugar" gets re-created, with the journal re-indexed info; but unfortunately, there still is NO "/home/olpc/.sugar/default/shell.log" :( So, answers to the following two queries will help in nailing the issue :: a) Is it possible to (temporarily) stop the re-indexing of the journal on reboot? If yes, that could give some hints as to if this is where the problem occurs. b) Better still, is it possible to have "shell.log" created as the first file after the directory "/home/sugar/.sugar" is created? Any further help will be highly appreciated :) Thanks and Regards, Ajay <div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 5:15 PM, Mikus Grinbergs <<a href="mailto:mikus@bga.com" target="_blank">mikus@bga.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div class="im">On 09/01/2012 12:21 AM, Gonzalo Odiard wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"> Sep 1 04:47:41 xo-05-2a-1f kernel: [ 104.561223] init: prefdm respawning too ffast, stopped </blockquote> </div> I can't help you - but I've run into such a situation before. X (the display) is crashing - and is being automatically restarted, only to crash again (and again, and again. and ...). I used to know how to stop these automatic restarts by commenting out something in /etc -- but things have changed an I don't know any longer. You being able to capture /var/log/messages implies that these automatic restarts were NOT interfering with you looking at the system. [And it implies to me that you might manually "patch" kernel files to correct whatever is causing the crash.] What you did capture does not show the actual problem. You will need to do additional looking - for instance, /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /home/olpc/.sugar/default/logs/shell.log Perhaps capture 'dmesg' Wish you luck, mikus </blockquote></div>