suddenly very slow boot with Ubuntu 7.10

Your symptoms seem to indicate bad RAM. If you have a copy of the Ubuntu CD, boot from it, and select 'Memory Check', and verify that your system memory is all ok.
If that checks out fine, can you post a copy of your boot log (/var/log/debug & /var/log/kern.log) - these will aid in finding any problems you might be running into.

Hi Adam, and thanks for your response.

I did that test as you suggested and tested my RAM with memtest86 from Ubuntu CD. I tested it about 3 hours (4 passes) without any errors. Because I need my computer for work, I'll test it again tonight over night to be sure that my RAM is working fine.

Because I can't see any options here how to attach files and my "debug" and "kern.log" files are to big to copy their content here, I'm sending them that way:

http://www.file-upload.net/download-463441/debug.html
http://www.file-upload.net/download-463442/kern.log.html

And here is the last snapshot from Bootchart:
http://www.file-upload.net/view-463453/gutsy-20071027-2.png.html

Thanks in advance,

Boris

Hi Adam,

I tested my RAM again over night about 10 hours long (15 passes) without any error messages.

Here is the result of that test:

http://www.file-upload.net/view-464709/Memtest.JPG.html

Boris

Hi again,

I've just tried to make some kind of "comparison" between two parts of kernel log entries from 24 and 26 October (before and after slow boot). As start points of comparison I used:

"Oct 24 12:23:04 habo kernel: Inspecting /boot/System.map-2.6.22-14-generic" (normal boot)
and
"Oct 26 09:23:28 habo kernel: Inspecting /boot/System.map-2.6.22-14-generic" (slow boot).

First entry is finished with:
"Oct 24 12:23:11 habo kernel: [ 30.196000] Clocksource tsc unstable (delta = -291627868 ns)"
and second with:
"Oct 26 09:24:18 habo kernel: [ 203.696000] Clocksource tsc unstable (delta = -100010982 ns)"

Here is that comparison as PDF file (I marked starting point of difference with bold print):

http://www.file-upload.net/download-464744/kernel-log-comparsion.pdf.html

Thanks,

Boris

Could you provide a second 'slow boot' example, so I can compare some things?
It appears that your system is stalling when probing ide1 - there is a 40 second delay the first time it probes the device on ide1, and then another hang of 70 seconds after initializing the filesystem on sdb1.

Also, if you wouldn't mind, can you provide them as individual text files, so I can use some tools against them? PDF's are hard to parse :)

Hi Adam,

here are two kernel log parts I used for comparison as text files:

http://www.file-upload.net/download-465781/normal_boot_24Oct.txt.html
http://www.file-upload.net/download-465787/slow_boot_26Oct.txt.html

Beside that I'm sending you part of kernel log from last boot with one photo-collage of that last boot. I was started boot without splash screen and it was slow enough to take few pictures and merge them to record (almost) whole process. Only last few entries before start of X-windows was to quick to take snapshot. :)

Picture is interesting because you can see that fsck at some boot point makes some corrections on superblocks with message:
"/dev/sdb1: Superblock last mount time is in the future. FIXED." This time I was lucky and I wasn't asked to run it manually after "fsck died with exit status 4".

So, here are the files:

http://www.file-upload.net/download-465789/slow_boot_last28Oct.txt.html
http://www.file-upload.net/view-465791/boot_28Oct.jpg.html

Btw. thanks a lot for taking your time to help me to solve that problem!

Boris

If possible, if you unplug your USB devices, does the system boot much faster?
I've worked on a few systems where a USB hub made boot time take substantially longer than normal.

Hi Adam,

Except printer I didn't have any other device plugged to my computer. If I need to use such devices like memory stick or camera, I plug them dynamically and unplug after work. So, today I unplugged my printer as you suggested, to see if system boot will be influenced, but there was no changes on boot speed.

Can you check 2 things:
1) Your BIOS clock and your system time should be set to the same thing - fixing inodes from the future is a sign of a clock messed up somewhere.
2) Can you run fsck or check your disks for errors?

Hi Adam,

1) BIOS clock vs. system clock

I don't know how exactly to proof that. If I'm type "date " in terminal I'm getting correct time. And if I type "hwclock" I'm getting also correct time but with some delay:

s7habo@habo:~$ hwclock
Mi 31 Okt 2007 20:21:05 CET -0.546616 seconds

What that means?

2) fsck
I boot from Ubuntu 7.10 Live CD and started fsck. That was result (sorry, that was a terminal with German language, becouse it was easier to me to understand what's happened):

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fsck.ext3 -v -f /dev/sdb1
e2fsck 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
SuperBlock last mount time is in the future. Repariere<j>? ja

Durchgang 1: Prüfe Inodes, Blocks, und Größen
Durchgang 2: Prüfe Verzeichnis Struktur
Durchgang 3: Prüfe Verzeichnis Verknüpfungen
Durchgang 4: Überprüfe die Referenzzähler
Durchgang 5: Überprüfe Gruppe Zusammenfassung

/dev/sdb1: ***** DATEISYSTEM WURDE VERÄNDERT *****

  399177 inodes used (1.34%)
   37227 non-contiguous inodes (9.3%)
         # of inodes with ind/dind/tind blocks: 69234/1777/0
52215894 blocks used (87.72%)
       0 bad blocks
       3 large files

  332821 regular files
   33099 directories
    1226 character device files
    4547 block device files
       2 fifos
     571 links
   27458 symbolic links (21444 fast symbolic links)
      15 sockets

Beside "SuperBlock last mount time is in the future" there was no other errors.

Thanks,

Boris

I forgot some details.

1)

s7habo@habo:~$ date
Mi 31. Okt 20:50:39 CET 2007
s7habo@habo:~$ hwclock --show
Mi 31 Okt 2007 20:50:52 CET -0.549939 seconds

2) Whith fsck I checked only /dev/sdb1 because /dev/sda1 is hard drive with Win XP (two partitions). I have two hard disks with two OS - Windows XP and Ubuntu 7.10, each at his own hard disk.

Hi Adam,

Because there was no solution for my boot problem, I decide to reinstall Ubuntu 7.10 and now I have nice boot speed:

http://www.file-upload.net/view-474553/gutsy-20071104-1.png.html

Thanks for your help,

Boris

There is a dirty solution for this:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

remove the "ro quiet splash" from the line where the ubuntu 7.10 is.

This makes the system boot fast, but also makes the boot ugly - all the messages of the init are displayed.

If this doesn't bother you, then do it.

Regards,
cenora