Re: Incredibly slow to boot - any ideas?
On Thu, 30 Mar, Philippe De Ryck wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-03-30 at 11:45 +0100, N.Pauli wrote:
> > Dear All,
> >
> > All of a sudden my machine has become incredibly slow to boot up and to launch anything - boot up took over 5 minutes and launching an app like Mozilla or OpenOffice can take just as long. All the while
> the harddisk drive light is burning constantly. It is as if there is some process that never completes, takes a long time to time out and restarts itself whenever I launch an app. Once I'm in, apps seem
> to run fairly normally. I've looked at 'top' and can't see any culprit there. I had this happen once before and it was solved by making sure that nothing was plugged in to a usb port while booting up or
> even logging on. The last significant things I have done prior to this happening do a normal update and upgrade using Synaptic and install Liferea.
> >
> > Can anybody give me any clues on where I can start looking to resolve this? The machine is a 1100 Mhz Intel Celeron with 256 Mb RAM so it shouldn't be struggling. I'm running Debian GNU/Linux testing
> / unstable and the 2.6.12-1-386 kernel.
> >
>
> Just an idea, but you might look into HDD-trouble. See what "hdparm
> -tT /dev/..." says. See what "smartctl -a /dev/..." says (good
> explanation can be found here:
> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6983).
>
> Maybe a monitor for disk activity can be useful too (gkrellm for example
> shows activity and speed).
Thanks, Philippe! Just the sort of pointers I was looking for. I'll try these and see what gives.
Nigel
--
Nigel Pauli
Network Manager
St. John's School, Northwood
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