Re: what did hwinfo do to my machine?
Miles Fidelman wrote:
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 to
GRUB!" 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
No, the fast-boot option is off (and has been off since I installed
Squeeze).
When I first noticed the slowness, since it was early in the boot
process (only GRUB was definitely slow, and the kernel was definitely
back to normal, at least after a dozen or so kernel messages at boot),
I thought that maybe hwinfo has messed with some CPU-speed option in
my BIOS, so re-set the BIOS to what I had set it to before, as I had
set it before (loading BIOS defaults and then setting about 8 things
(from a written plan (as opposed to just from memory))).
- maybe turn on BIOS logging and see if it catches any funniness during
the pre-GRUB boot process
I haven't seen anything about "BIOS logging" in my BIOS's menus. Is
it common? It is known by any other names?
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
No, it has always found the ethernet interface just fine. I was setting
up PPP for a backup connection when I had the modem detection problem
and tried hwinfo.
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
Okay, thanks. Maybe I'll try that.
- you might check your drive maker's web site for hardware-specific
diagnostics
I do have a diagnostics CD, so I can try that too.
Daniel
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