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(a)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