[ale] GRUB issue on boot

[Michael B. Trausch]

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Jim wrote On 04/14/2006 10:40 AM:
> Since we're on the hot issue of boot loaders, I've had a problem with 
> grub on one system for a long time.  It takes forever to boot.  It's an 
> old 600 mhz Celeron booting from a 40 Mhz WD drive.
> 
> It comes up quickly with the first Grub 1.5 message, first stage, 
> maybe?  I don't recall the exact format.  About a minute or two later, 
> the second stage message comes up and after another minute+ the kernel 
> starts to load.  I see the disk light is pretty solid during these times 
> but I can't for the life of me figure out what is going on.
> 
> I Recently scrubbed the root partition (after backing it up) 
> reinitialized the partition from scratch and did a net install of Debian 
> 3.1, hoping it would clear up.  No luck.  Fortunately I don't reboot 
> this system very often.  It's just a test platform and file server of sorts.
> 
> There are no disk errors in the syslog, I'm running ext3 file systems, 
> but the old one was ext2.  Does anyone have a clue as to what's going 
> on?  I'm thinking about going to lilo after reading this thread.
> 

You can try LILO, but I have the feeling that the problem may be
somewhere in the hardware itself.  Both LILO and GRUB work exceedingly
slowly on some of the older hardware that I have, mostly my old
fileserver and my one girlfriend's laptop.  I never did figure out why
that was, precisely, but my guess is that they just don't move data very
quickly.  They both booted older distributions just fine, but with the
size of the kernel as it is nowadays, even in a minimalistic
configuration where everything is a module, it can take a minute or more
to load the entire thing into memory.

(FYI, the old fileserver also used to run FreeBSD and that also booted
slowly -- even more slowly then Linux -- but then again, the kernel was
like 8 MB or something.)

	- Mike
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