I'm running Kubuntu Fiesty Fawn, and recently have had some problems with a hard drive. While I was out of town on business my wife wasn't able to boot the system; it hung for a long time and then came up with an unrecoverable error pointing to the drive I've been having problems with. I used knoppix to comment the offending hard drive out in fstab, so now my system will boot again. However, it still hangs for about a minute early in the boot up process. I don't recall the system taking this long to boot before, so I think there might be another error I'm not seeing. Unfortunately Kubuntu doesn't show me any messages when this is happening (the progress bar just stops moving). Is there a way to force Kubuntu into text mode during boot up like other distros (f2, etc), or if not can someone point me to the log file this information would be stored in?

Check /etc/fstab to see if it's mounting that drive at boot. You can use a live cd to boot into recovery mode or use the option in the grub menu.

Yes, this is exactly what I did to get it to boot at all. But now it still hangs for a while (over a minute) at about 20%. Once it gets past the hang up, the rest of the boot proceeds very quickly though.

Come up in recovery mode - it's single user, but also drops the quiet off the boot options. You could also hack the boot options yourself, but I don't see the point.

Thanks! That did it. As I suspected, it came up with lots of errors around that same drive, even though it isn't included in fstab. I pulled the power lead from the drive and powered back up, and now it boots fine. Now all I have to do is hassle with Maxtor on the warranty for the drive.