I recently installed Ubuntu on my Acer Aspire laptop to make use of the 64bit processor (the machine shipped with WinXP Home edition). I've had no issues with neither Ubuntu nor GRUB on other hardware, but on the laptop, GRUB takes ages to load. After the BIOS POST, there's a blank screen with a blinking cursor for some 30-45 seconds, after which the grub menu finally shows up, after that, everything runs smoothly, with no slowdowns. NTLOADER boots up instantly, but that doesn't really help, because if I were to add Ubuntu into the Windows bootmenu (yuk!), GRUB would still have to load, and I'd just get extra overhead from having to load NTLOADER first.

I don't have any splash-screens or other eye-candy in GRUB, and other than renaming the Caption of my second windows boot-option I've made no changes to what Ubuntu Feisty defaults to.

Any help at all with this would be greatly appreciated, because this is a major nuisance, mainly because I need the laptop to be ready for use as fast as possible when I power it on, for obvious reasons.

Thank you in advance for any and all replies, and please do tell if any further information is needed, I'll be more than happy to provide additional details.

"After the BIOS POST, there's a blank screen with a blinking cursor for some 30-45 seconds,"

This time is not necessarily spent in Grub. It might be spent in the BIOS before the BIOS boots. Check your BIOS settings to see if the BIOS is wasting time on something like a memory test. Another possible cause of the wait is the BIOS querying some faulty device and waiting 30seconds to time out with no response from the device.

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Steve Stites

As I stated above, the delay isn't present when booting to NTLOADER, or from another grub instance, on an usb-disk for instance. I managed to fix the problem just now, however by reinstalling grub with apt-get and reinstalling grub on to the mbr. Still don't know what caused the slowdown, though, but I'm clad my system's booting up again.

I _DID_ manage to shave something in the area of five second from my POST, by following your clue, Steve, so many thanks for that.