On 06/03/2012 11:05 PM, 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 to GRUB!" text and the "error: fd0 read error." text, and another 25 seconds for the screen to go blank on the way to displaying the menu. Kernel booting might be slow for the first dozen or so messages; after that, everything seems to be fine.) What the heck did hwinfo do to my machine?
I can't speak about hwinfo. But the problem seems to be in your hardware somehow.
I know that in the early days of USB support, some computers thought non-booting USB devices (like a printer) was a boot device, and would look for a boot record there and hang for a long time. We got around that by unplugging the printer until after the POST part of booting.
I'm also suspecting a floppy drive issue, that the BIOS is set to boot from it and one doesn't exist, or some such.
Also, back to the USB printer, perhaps you have a memory card inserted into a memory card slot on the printer (having printed some pictures from it a few days ago, maybe), and the computer is seeing that card via the printer connection and trying to boot from it.
Maybe these comments will help; if not, apologies for the noise. -- Kent