baeuchlein on 27/11/2010 at 01:10
Quote Posted by Renzatic
[...]If that doesn't work, I'll blame it all on my dad. I know for a fact that whenever something doesn't work quite right while he's playing around on the internet (like Chrome comes up in a window instead of maximized), he'll start clicking all over the screen, and hitting random buttons on the keyboard until he gives up and calls me.
And when he does that, he usually messes something up [...]
Strange... we seem to have the same father...:p
Anyway... I think you're on the right track. More information is needed to find out what is happening here and how it can be prevented in the future. Trying to recreate the situation is almost essential now.
lost_soul on 27/11/2010 at 08:34
Usually with Linux: either it will suspend/hibernate, or it won't. I leave my Debian system logged in for *days* at a time, never suspending or hibernating and it never does anything like that. My older box always fails to wake up from a suspend though, displaying a black screen until I reboot it. That is an example of when suspend/hibernate completely fails.
Renzatic on 3/12/2010 at 00:55
Quote Posted by baeuchlein
Strange... we seem to have the same father...:p
Yup, and I'm blaming it all on him, because...
Quote:
Trying to recreate the situation is almost essential now.
...this is something I cannot do. When I have the laptop in front of me, it performs as it should. I've let it set for two hours, rebooted, rebooted again, rebooted yet again, let it set for another two hours, rebooted yet another again, and...nothing weird. Nary a blip or a hiccup to be seen. As far as I'm concerned, everything is working as it should.
I only had the display set to put itself to sleep after a certain amount of time, and I've been able to pull it back from sleep over and over again with no ill effects.
So, once again, hell if I know. I just handed the laptop back to mom and told her to deal with it. It isn't an everyday thing. it isn't even a once a week thing. If it takes extra long to boot up one time, then blame it on something dad did, and wait it out.
Not much more I can do. : \
Al_B on 4/12/2010 at 13:33
Just throwing in a possibility that I haven't seen mentioned. Could it be that she's letting the battery run down until it simply powers off? It could be that it's being unplugged but she doesn't realise it as the laptop will continue to work.
I don't know about ubuntu, but a partition that isn't cleanly dismounted can force a disk check (fsck or the filesystem equivalent) at startup. This could explain why it sometimes takes a long time - although I would have expected to see something in the system log.
baeuchlein on 10/12/2010 at 21:37
Quote Posted by Al_B
a partition that isn't cleanly dismounted can force a disk check (fsck or the filesystem equivalent) at startup. This could explain why it sometimes takes a long time - although I would have expected to see something in the system log.
Debian Linux 4.0 checks whether the
root filesystem was cleanly umounted the last time, and if that was not the case (mostly because the system crashed or the machine was turned off without properly shutting down the operating system), Debian indeed forces a fsck (filesystem check) run for the
root filesystem. When this is being done, a progress bar is shown. If the fsck program finds errors, it corrects them and forces a reboot. If errors are found but cannot be repaired by fsck, the system might be halted instead of rebooted.
In any case, there are usually two report files from the last fsck command run at boot time; they can be found in /var/log/fsck/. I am not certain whether these state clearly that an error has been found or not - I find them difficult to read. Anyway... there definitely is
no entry in /var/log/messages or the output of dmesg. I haven't found anything concerning filesystem checks in the logs in /var/log/ so far, so it's likely only something in /var/log/fsck/.
Other filesystems are handled different, though. I usually let Linux mount some FAT filesystems automatically at boot, and these are
not checked if the system was not powered down properly. Only the root filesystem (ext2 type) gets this "privilege".
Things could be different if ext3 or ext4 is used as the root filesystem. ext3 is said to be a somewhat improved ext2 variant, making it possible to repair a filesystem that was not properly umounted before without doing a full fsck. No idea how this would look like. Believe me or not, but I still use the old ext2 system instead of all this newer stuff.
I have no idea what Linux does with
other (meaning: non-root) ext2 or ext3 filesystems, let alone NTFS ones. I
think you can define that behaviour in /etc/fstab, but I'm not certain. (You could try
man fsck to find out, however.)
Add to that the fact that I know
Debian, but have very little experience with
Ubuntu, and you see that everything is possible here...:(
Zerker on 11/12/2010 at 00:18
I have two partitions in my home Linux setup: root and home. Linux forces a check of the home partition once after X powerups (I forget the exact number). I disabled the check in FSTAB, however, as I'm not worried about disk checks on a journaled file system that's backed up daily.
Renzatic on 11/12/2010 at 00:28
As it turns out, it's more a hardware problem than it is a Linux one. After suffering through slow boot times for a couple of weeks, mom decided to ditch Ubuntu and go back to Windows 7. I obliged and slapped everything back together the way it was...
...only to discover it's doing the exact same thing in Win7 as it was in Ubuntu. The installation went swimmingly, as did the first couple of reboots, but now? Same 10 minute boot times. Turns out this wasn't a Linux issue after all.
It's still not exactly an easy resolve though. I can't chalk it up directly to hardware, because once the OS runs fine once it's done booting up. It could possibly be some complication with the battery. It's three years old now, and only holds 35% of it's original max charge. Mom keeps the laptop plugged in at all times, so it shouldn't affect the normal runnings of the computer. And even if it did, why would it only bother the comp during boot? Same deal with the harddrive. A bad HDD would be throwing random hard freezes and blue screens my way left and right, not just making the computer boot slower. Memory? I ran the RAM test from GRUB before uninstalling Ubuntu, and it reported no errors after 5 passes.
The only thing I can figure is that someone, at some point, changed something in the BIOS. I checked everything out in there, and it looked good at first glance, but I need to dig a little deeper before I dismiss it as the cause of the problem. Beyond that, I'm stumped.
snobel on 11/12/2010 at 12:15
Does it make a difference if you boot while the battery is removed? I know someone with a laptop that is unusably slow unless you either remove the battery or disable a certain battery related service. But that is an XP-only problem, so probably not relevant.
While on Linux, did you ever run Bootchart?
baeuchlein on 11/12/2010 at 21:51
Quote Posted by snobel
Does it make a difference if you boot while the battery is removed?
I, too, would recommend checking this. We have an ancient laptop here, with a damaged battery pack (it won't recharge no matter what we do). If the battery is inserted properly, the machine won't boot, even if the power supply is connected to a wall outlet. If we remove the battery, everything's fine. Perhaps the laptop tries to charge the battery and cannot handle a defective one - I don't know.
Al_B on 11/12/2010 at 21:55
Just to throw something else in the mix. I've seen problems before with hard drives with corrupt sectors taking a very long time to start up. The hard drive automatically retries and eventually it works - but it's not obvious to the user. Doing a full disk scan with bad sector detection should pick it up, however, and is probably worth doing. Laptops can be more susceptible to the problem as they tend to be moved (or dropped!) more.
