Re: Incredibly slow to boot - any ideas? - SOLVED
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.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Nigel
> >
> > --
> > Nigel Pauli
> > Network Manager
> > St. John's School, Northwood
> >
>
> 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 for all the advice and help. In the end it did turn out to be hardware related and not the fault of GConf. I'd run 'hdparm -tT /dev/hda' in single user mode and when running from a live disk and seen only a marginal improvement in the timing of buffered disk reads but a smartctl self test returned no errors even though it took 21 minutes rather than 2 minutes to run I was just about to take out the hard drive to run it in a different machine when a colleague suggested taking out a memory module.
As soon as I took them both out it seemed a very good idea - one was 128Mb and the other 256Mb from different manufacturers. I returned only the 256Mb module, rebooted and everything flew.
I'm going to keep monitoring the system for a while but I do reckon that I now have a happy ending.
Once again, thanks everyone for all your help and advice.
Nigel
--
Nigel Pauli
Network Manager
St. John's School, Northwood
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