Re: what did hwinfo do to my machine?

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 04 Jun 2012 13:00:39 -0400, Dan B. wrote:

> Camaleón wrote:

(...)

>>>> Well, that error can be relevant.
>>> How?  It's not the *presence* of the message that has changed.
>> 
>> My crystal ball did not mention that the above error message was
>> present before ;-)
> 
> Hey, don't blame me for your assuming (or misinterpreting my words to
> mean) that the "error: fd0 read error." message was new.  I wrote "_the_
> ... error text", not something like "_an_ error,"  and, I referred to
> the welcome text and the error message text with exactly the same
> structure ("the ... text"):

Hey, dude, take it easy and calm down, it's okay :-)

Is that an error in this stage I wouldn't take it as "normal", I would 
worry about it or at least would dig about if that's a known issue or 
something that's worth reporting.

>>> 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).
>> 
>> Yes, I know that behaviour; it's the same long delay I get in one of my
>> testing virtual machines.
> 
> How long are the delays you usually see (from the welcome message to any
> fd0 error message, from either the later of those to the screen's
> blanking, and from then to the GRUB menu)?

I didn't count the exact time it takes but is enough to be annoying and 
noticeable. But this happens on just one system I have with Wheezy and I 
don't get that error coming from the floppy disk (being a notebook I 
don't even have such a device).

>>> 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.
>> 
>> Well, I can't tell what it means but given the nature of the message
>> ("error") I would ensure anything is all right.
> 
> But what is there to check?  The message seems perfectly well explained:
> At the level of reading from the floppy drive, there's read error
> because there's no floppy in the drive; that floppy read error isn't a
> problem at the GRUB level, because GRUB has been reporting that
> floppy-read error and still booting at normal speed ever since I
> installed, until this hwinfo "incident."

You try and tell... or not, that's up to you. But again, I wouldn't 
consider that a normal behaviour unless it is documented somewhere; I've 
never seen that error message before.

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón