Renzatic on 11/12/2010 at 22:10
I think Snobel and Baeuchlein had the right idea, Al. I should still do a full disk scan just to be on the safe side, but taking the battery out seems to have fixed the problem. I've rebooted it four times now, and each time it's taken no more than 50 seconds to reach the desktop.
I'm still tentative here, but I think the problem is now fixed. I'll send it back to the family and see how it does over the next couple of days. If they don't complain, I'll say it's done.
And it really pisses me off to think that, after all that goofing around, all I had to do was take out the battery. Granted, it was kind of an elusive thing. I didn't even see it slow boot myself until earlier this week. Oh well. You learn something new everyday.
Al_B on 11/12/2010 at 23:20
It's good to know that you may have tracked down the problem. I've not seen a faulty battery slow startup - usually battery life just degrades drastically over time but perhaps the charging circuit is sending confusing power messages which throttles the processor (but that's just a theory).
Renzatic on 12/12/2010 at 04:40
Yeah, I'm a bit confused as to why it'd do that as well. But if it works, it works...
lost_soul on 12/12/2010 at 19:39
I transitioned all of my systems to ext4 a wile ago, because waiting for fsck to run after every thirtieth boot on an ext3 partition was very painful. Ext4 does file-system checks MUCH faster. I wonder how long fsck would take to run on a 1 TB partition...
Renzatic on 12/12/2010 at 21:30
Damn. Spoke too soon. :(
Whatever it is, it's getting worse. My guess now is it's the harddrive, considering the constant thrashing I'm hearing during boot that continues long after it lands on the desktop. A full disk scan hasn't reported any bad sectors or any other potential problems, but right now it's the guess that makes the most sense.
It isn't overheating, so if it isn't that, then it has to be a problem with the motherboard or some component therein. That'll be much, much more difficult to pin down.
baeuchlein on 14/12/2010 at 11:17
Quote Posted by lost_soul
I transitioned all of my systems to ext4 a wile ago, because waiting for fsck to run after every thirtieth boot on an ext3 partition was very painful. Ext4 does file-system checks MUCH faster. I wonder how long fsck would take to run on a 1 TB partition...
Ironically, the long fsck runs on ext3 filesystems (at least according to what I read on the internet some years ago) were the reason for
staying with ext2 on my machines. When ext3 was born, they babbled about how it would make fsck runs obsolete and so on, but in the end, it turned out to be the other way round. But of course they pulled another rabbit out of their hat: ext4. This would surely make fsck runs faster and such. Yeah, sure.
Since ext4 was marked as "experimental" in my distribution these days, I decided to neither try ext3 nor ext4. If their filesystems fail to live up to their expectations, then I see no reason to change my running systems.
Maybe things were different if I had really large ext2/3/4 filesystems, but I use ext2 only for my Linux root partitions, and they're all below 6 GBytes in size. The main stuff had to be dumped on FAT filesystems since it had to be compatible with Windows, and I have had no time yet to check NTFS support and everyday use in Linux or Windows. And since I don't need most of NTFS' advantages when compared to FAT, I still use ancient FAT for data storage. This may change in the future, but at the moment, I have other things to do than fumble with all these new filesystems. Like getting printing and network shares to work flawlessly, which Linux
still can't accomplish. Sometimes I'm wondering what it is that the Linux community claims to be improving over all these years...:tsktsk:
All right, back to the topic now...
Quote Posted by Renzatic
Whatever it is, it's getting worse. My guess now is it's the harddrive, considering the constant thrashing I'm hearing during boot that continues long after it lands on the desktop. A full disk scan hasn't reported any bad sectors or any other potential problems, but right now it's the guess that makes the most sense.
I have seen some hard drives over the past years which obviously were slowly dying of old age, but neither surface scans nor S.M.A.R.T. readings indicated any problem. Strange messages in Linux ("hda: lost interrupt") and extremely slow hard drive speeds still told me there was something wrong, especially since it happened with any computer to which one of these old disks was connected.
And then there were some rare cases where S.M.A.R.T. was turned off after or during boot, meaning that the hard disks did not report any errors in their S.M.A.R.T. log even if these occurred. Sometimes, one can turn S.M.A.R.T. on and off in the BIOS, sometimes one has to do it all with software. My Linuxes now have a "smartctl -s on /dev/hdX" line for every hard disk in their startup scripts.
Windows XP appears to access S.M.A.R.T. data even if S.M.A.R.T. is turned off in BIOS, but I have no idea what XP actually does with this data or whether XP turns S.M.A.R.T. on automatically.
Quote Posted by Renzatic
It isn't overheating, so if it isn't that, then it has to be a problem with the motherboard or some component therein. That'll be much, much more difficult to pin down.
Uh-oh. Reminds me of some hardware nightmares I encountered over all these years. Current shit-of-the-day is a mainboard which can't use parallel printer ports flawlessly, not even non-onboard ones...:mad:
lost_soul on 14/12/2010 at 19:30
There were some major stability issues with ext4 in the early days. IIRC Ubuntu 9.04 had a bug where your system could hard lock while writing lots of data to one. Accusations were thrown around as to whose fault the instability was. Apparently app developers weren't calling syncs to the disk at the right time, assuming information was committed to disk when it may not have been. I haven't had any ext4-related issues since last year though. I think even Google has transitioned to ext4.
Renzatic on 15/12/2010 at 02:17
Quote Posted by baeuchlein
I have seen some hard drives over the past years which obviously were slowly dying of old age, but neither surface scans nor S.M.A.R.T. readings indicated any problem. Strange messages in Linux ("hda: lost interrupt") and extremely slow hard drive speeds still told me there was something wrong, especially since it happened with any computer to which one of these old disks was connected.
And then there were some rare cases where S.M.A.R.T. was turned off after or during boot, meaning that the hard disks did not report any errors in their S.M.A.R.T. log even if these occurred. Sometimes, one can turn S.M.A.R.T. on and off in the BIOS, sometimes one has to do it all with software. My Linuxes now have a "smartctl -s on /dev/hdX" line for every hard disk in their startup scripts.
Windows XP appears to access S.M.A.R.T. data even if S.M.A.R.T. is turned off in BIOS, but I have no idea what XP actually does with this data or whether XP turns S.M.A.R.T. on automatically.
My scouring of the BIOS didn't turn up any SMART related options, so I'm assuming it's on and running properly. As for why it intermittent slow boots, I could think of a number of theories, but all of them come down to what you stated above: old harddrive.
I'm gonna swap it out for a new one, and if that doesn't fix the problem, I'm just gonna tell mom and dad to get a new computer. I could spend hours uninstalling drivers, or trying to look cool with a multimeter, but in the end, any single problem with the motherboard will require an entire motherboard replacement. For that price, you can practically get a brand new computer.
So...cross your fingers for me and wish me the best.
Quote:
Uh-oh. Reminds me of some hardware nightmares I encountered over all these years. Current shit-of-the-day is a mainboard which can't use parallel printer ports flawlessly, not even non-onboard ones...:mad:
My God. I haven't had to goof around with a parallel port in years. I think your comp problems might be a little more frustrating than mine are. :P
baeuchlein on 15/12/2010 at 10:27
Quote Posted by Renzatic
As for why it intermittent slow boots, I could think of a number of theories, but all of them come down to what you stated above: old harddrive.
I'm gonna swap it out for a new one, and if that doesn't fix the problem, I'm just gonna tell mom and dad to get a new computer.
Seems to be a good plan. You could also check whether the suspicious harddrive acts weird in other computers, too.
Quote Posted by Renzatic
I could spend hours uninstalling drivers
I don't think that would help, since the problems already start during the boot process, and are present in two very different operating systems (Windows and Linux). That looks like some kind of hardware problem.
Quote Posted by Renzatic
I haven't had to goof around with a parallel port in years. I think your comp problems might be a little more frustrating than mine are. :P
Depends. The ones with the old hard disks are not important, for these were located in old and mostly unused machines. In some months, I will probably verify that these disks are still hiccuping, and if that is the case, they might get trashed. Problem gone.:ebil:
The parallel port thing is a bit frustrating, though. Took me some while to detect the exact problem (or at least I
hope I found the exact problem now...:sweat:), then I could think about solving it. Currently, the printer attached to that computer is connected with a parallel cable for Linux and an ancient serial cable for Windows. Well, at least it works.
The downside? With that serial cable, the printer goes down to about one page per minute(!). Must be the slowest laser printer the world has seen in years...:cheeky:
