A.6. The console is unresponsive after connecting
The terminal's screen may be blank after connecting to the
machine. Pressing Enter will usually bring up a
login: request.
If no characters appear upon the screen after pressing
Enter do not panic. The machine must have power
and the operating system must have booted: for our call to be
answered by the modem Data Terminal Ready must be active.
The most likely thing is that the machine booted and is
running a fsck filesystem check. These checks
can take some considerable time, all with no or very little
output.
It will help your peace of mind considerably to record in the
system log book the time fsck takes to check
each filesystem.
If you see garbled text after pressing Enter
then there are mismatched bit rates or parity parameters. Correct
your terminal emulator's configuration.