Ubuntu

Something funny happens during bootloading

Asked by John Winterton

Today, for the first time ever, I had a hard hang during processing. Ever since then, the bootloading process has taken a very long time between the POSTs and the appearance of the GRUB screen. I am wondering if this might be a symptom of trouble in my boot sector.

Any thoughts on the subject would be appreciated.

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marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said : 		#1

May be Ubuntu was performing the periodic partition check... for errors...

Please reboot to verify if you have not this issue more...

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John Winterton (jwinterton) said : 		#2

I have rebnooted several times, and reinstalled grub just to make sure that the boot sector was ok. I am accustomed to the ckfs run every 24 reboots or so, and it wasn't that. I also used gparted to check the non-mounted partitions. I have two copies of the O/S out, and so was able to check both disks by booting to different versions. Nothing turned up. I don;t think this is software.

I am beginning to think my machine has passed its best before date. I have been having frequency problems with my GPU and this was reported at boot time at least once. Fortunately for me, maybe, my NVIDIA GPU is an IGP and it has a slot for an AGP. I have sourced the AGP for less than $50, and I hope that might solve the problem.

Just to put icing on the cake, my mouse is dying of old age as well. I had to set it to left hand usage so that I could click at all. Poor thing, it has wear marks on the buttons.

I was hoping that some one other than myself had experienced this kind of lock up and funny boot behaviour. I really wanted to compare notes. I'd like to know what the system is doing between the POSTs and arriving at the GRUB screen. It takes about five minutes or more sitting with a blank screen showing an under-bar cursor. The system passes the POSTs with no problem, so I wonder what the supervisor is doing loading up grub. Is there any way to have the console show at this time?

I am a retired professor of computer science, so I do know more than somewhat about these things. I'm just not very good with microcomputers as my vision is a little chancy.

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John Winterton (jwinterton) said : 		#3

Oh, one more thing. I did get an archive made when I got back up the first time.

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Sam_ (and-sam) said : 		#4

Actually when some hd related issues occur disk utility might say something.
Maybe do a SMART test
system administration -> disk utility

and MEM test via boot menu.

Logfiles are a smart place to go to.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LinuxLogFiles

Other diagnose tools.
http://bootinfoscript.sourceforge.net/
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

More simple, e.g. when your /boot is on a separate partition it might overloaded with older kernel images?
Then clean up and also package cache.

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Sam_ (and-sam) said : 		#5

Erratum: ...it might be overloaded...

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John Winterton (jwinterton) said : 		#6

Thanks. Will give all this a try. Grub does s3eem to keep a lot of kernel images around. Can I kill them with synaptic, or is there another tool?

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