Hye all, I just reinstalled slack 10.1, and it's being a complete *explicative*. It takes a bloody long time to get out of the lilo screen, and then even longer to go through the bootup process.

It seems to hang at "updating shared libraries" and it sits there for at least 5 minutes.

Along with that, all my programs take a long time to load up in X, and transferring between two hard drives is at speeds like 100~ KB/s, with slight bursts up to 1.5MB/s when i'm lucky.

My shell takes a long time to do stuff, like initiate *anything* "top, mplayer (which skips like a little girl at recess), let alone listing or going to SU.

Please help, i don't want to reinstall for what seems like the 10th-odd-something time.

thanks

Can you post the result of "hdparm /dev/hda"?

bash-3.00# hdparm /dev/hda2

/dev/hda2:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 65535/16/63, sectors = 21138969600, start = 36869175
bash-3.00#

There's a light at the end of the tunnel.

Add this line to lilo.conf
run lilo

It's also possible and relatively safe to comment out the ldconfig bit in /etc/rc.d/rc.M and that'll take care of the '5 minutes'.

What are the specs of this machine? I suspect the problem is deeper. Could be a buggy driver for your ide chipset, or something else.

--Shade

well, it has worked fine in the past, but it seems everytime i reformat and reinstall linux, something new goes wrong... and i'm doing everything the same way

but last time no one helped me in the forums...

its a p3 1ghz 512ram 740GB running on a promise card.

lately a lot of things are buggy, like my dvd-rw drive doesn't see media when i put it in, and other things but the bootup is the most annoying.

i will now try this, and see what happens

thanks!

okay, did everything you told me to do, but i'm in the process of upgrading slackware w/ swaret.

so, i will restart and post the conclusion in a few hours

As far as the DVD-rw issue, is it possible that you have just forgotten to mount the drive after inserting the media?

no, it says that during mounting... and also sometimes i can play a dvd

*cough* let me correct myself

i can play the first two chapters of a dvd (the FBI warning and whatever else is there) and then xine or whatever freaks out and says (no medium found)

Does that happen with cds too?

I think you're running accross encrypted dvds, for which you'll need libdvdcss...

--Shade

Isn't the readahead set too high? On my system it's 8. Try setting it to 8 or even disable it completely and see if it fixes the problem.