On Jun 25, 2010, at 11:11 PM, Linuxguy123 wrote:
On Thu, 2010-06-24 at 18:53 -0700, Peter Langfelder wrote:
On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Linuxguy123 linuxguy123@gmail.com wrote:
Update
I cloned the original 160 GB hard drive onto a new 160 GB SSD. The booting problem is even worse now. It used to take 2-6 tries to get my laptop to boot. Now it takes about 10.
The SMART tests from the original 160 GB drive all came back fine. So did all the fscks.
I've run the bios memory check and it comes back fine too.
The boot problem also occurred when I booted the ubuntu 10.4 live CD.
Any ideas ?
Unless the BIOS memory test is exhaustive rather than quick, run memtest. However, it could also be a motherboard problem or problem with seating of the internal boards in the machine.
I ran memtest for 8 hours +. No errors. Interestingly, the memtest CD boots instantly, every time. This looks like a kernel issue.
If you hadn't mentioned problems with the CD, I'd be suggesting that you check whether the old BIOS C:/D: ambiguity were biting you. It bites me unless I use either labels or UUIDs on all my drives. I'll go in and switch the /etc/fstab entries from sda1 to sdb1 and re- boot. Works fine. Power down. Next day I power up and it gets stuck just where it should be starting to dump out the list of modules successfully loaded.
If I'm quick with the camera, I can catch a screen telling me it's having a hard time with a partition, could the partition be zero- length or something? and then it starts repeating prompts to press ctl-d to boot to single user, which, apparently because of SELinux, it isn't allowed to do, then it goes into a prompt loop. And no logs, again, apparently because of security policies.
Anyway, I thought the drives must be dying (the typical reason suggested for BIOS toggling C and D), but smartd doesn't tell me anything either. So I dug up the UUIDs for the partitions and put those in /etc/fstab instead of /dev/sda1, etc. and it works just fine.
But if you're having problems with the CD, it's hard to see how the entry in /etc/fstab would cause that.
Joel Rees