I have a Debian system (Etch) running kernel 2.6.18-6-686 that takes around 18 minutes to boot.

The network connection comes active after about 30 seconds into the boot, but the host stops responding to pings around 10 seconds later.

Generally the console hangs on either:

Starting MYSQL

or

Starting MTA

During this time it wont accept keyboard input, not even ctrl+alt+del.

15 minutes later it will continue to boot normally. I have removed both sendmail and mysql from starting automatically and still the problem remains. I fixed the usual hostname issue that causes Sendmail to delay on starting.

I also thought it could be to do with IPV6 and have tried to disable this by editing /etc/modprobe/alias etc.

It seems it just hangs for exactly 15 minutes exactly 1 minute into the boot, irrespective of what services I have starting. Even if I boot in single user mode it hangs on the root password prompt (although I have to admit I haven't waited 15 minutes to see if it releases itself, and this is using a remote KVM so may be a red herring).

Any suggestions would be gratefully received!

Thanks.

As an update, I thought it might be to do with hwclock which was failing. It wasn't :-(

ACPI. I should have guessed.

Disabled ACPI by adding acpi=off into /boot/grub/menu.lst and it now boots in 30 seconds.

Not sure what was going on, but it was as if it was put into suspend mode for 15 minutes.

What sort of hardware (CPU) ?.
Do you lose multi-processor capability ?.