Dan B. wrote:
Camaleón wrote:On Mon, 04 Jun 2012 00:05:13 -0400, Dan B. wrote:After I ran hwinfo (to detect a modem), my machine runs very slowly at the beginning of booting. (GRUB takes about 8 seconds between displaying the the "Welcome toGRUB!" text and the "error: fd0 read error."^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ (...) Well, that error can be relevant.How? It's not the *presence* of the message that has changed. It's the *delay* between the "Welcome to GRUB!" message and that "error: fd0 read error." message that has changed (to 8 or 9 seconds, from something close to zero). Besides, that error message (presumably) simply means that GRUB didn't successfully read from the floppy drive, which makes perfect sense since there's no floppy in it.
ahh... but there may be various timeouts involved that have changed, for example: - is the BIOS set to run POST every time, or just under certain circumstances, if so, what happens if you set the "fast boot" option - maybe turn on BIOS logging and see if it catches any funniness during the pre-GRUB boot process
also sounds like your system was having problems finding the network card at one point, and then that changed - maybe your hardware is flakey - run some diagnostics
re. your question about SATA diagnostics:- smart tools can give you a lot of diagnostic and configuration info about your drives, a flaky boot sector might cause a bunch of re-reads by the drive hardware - you might check your drive maker's web site for hardware-specific diagnostics
Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra