Kernel boot problems or is my hard drive failing ?

[Joel Rees]

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 at 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