hey guys, i just did a fresh ubuntu install on an "old"er computer of mine (2.4ghz, 512 ram, 9700pro, etc). When i try to load grub, however, its __insanely__ slow. it was 30 minutes ago when i booted the computer and it is at "initrd /boot/initrd.img-..." is there a way i can get rid of grub (i dont plan on dual booting or anything)? or is there an alternative, and if so, how would i go about replacing grub?

thanks
Robert

Grub shouldn't be blamed for your problem as, GRUB simply loads the kernel and initrd into memory and passes control to the kernel. If it takes too long while the initrd is being loaded the, probably your initrd image is too big. Since both kernel and initrd are compressed it would take some time for the kernel and initrd to be decompressed. If you have all the necessary modules (for the root partition to come up) built into the kernel, you can discard the initrd which, would save you a lot of time.

Note, initrd is used to include those modules, which are necessary to bring up the root partition (and for modules that certain strange/special hardware needs at earlier phase at boot time) . Once the root partition is mounted, the kernel can load any other needed modules directly from the root partition. Hence, if your root partition can come up without the initrd then you probab;y don't need an initrd.

You computer's configuration rather good, any boot loader needs no so much hardware resources. I never seen slow booting linux-kernel by LILO or GRUB from Pentium-1 times. I don't know what it is the problem, but you can try LILO.


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Vladimir
http://unix-news.blogspot.com

a very strange thing happened. I decided to leave it loading over night and when i woke up, it said that there was a write error on the harddrive. It happened again after a reinstall. But since it installed fine, it cant be a problem with the harddrive, can it? I'm going to try to install suse or debian later and see what happens.

edit: i just booted into the ubuntu cd and mounted the cd and there dont appear to be any problems with the harddrive itself. bug in ubuntu?

edit2: debian has the same problem. grr what do i do? i dont have another harddrive to test it with (though i doubt its a harddrive problem) could it be a bios setting?? i really doubt that because there were no install problems =(

Is seems to be you have hardware error with your HDD in MBR or track where is your boot loader installed.


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Vladimir
http://unix-news.blogspot.com

You can try mucking about with hdparm and slowing down your hard disk even further, which has a slight chance of either reducing errors or making them worse...

Before trying that, I'd update that old BIOS.

I recently had this problem on a compaq deskpro. It ran rather flaky with Windows so I figured I'd just burn Linux to it and see how things went. Turns out it had a BIOS bug where it was reporting the wrong IRQs. Windows didn't care though. It happly played scratchy audio and tried to make the best of the disk errors. Linux, on the other hand, wasn't so careless. Linux would stop and consider things for a while, write messages to the terminal and logs, chew on the configurations for a few minutes and then complain about a bad disk.

The updated compaq utilities disk download fixed the bugged BIOS and now it works like a champ...an old, beat-up retired and warmed-over champ maybe, but a champ just the same.

thanks guys ill surely give that a try. i managed to boot into debian after a long while (though i didnt really like it) so now im installing suse and buying a floppy drive so i can update my drivers. thanks for all the help guys ill be sure to let you know how it goes