Hi,
I have successfully installed SUSE10 dual-booting with Windows XP2.
XP2 is on the first partition of HDD 1 and Linux is on first partition of HDD2.
GRUB is the boot loader.

Problem After the BIOS processing is completed, the PC successfully finds GRUB.
The issues a message "loading GRUB 1.5" it then takes as long to bring up the GRUB selection panel, as it does for a similar system, with dual booted XP systems, to completely load the primary XP system ready for work.

I could perhaps live with this if the selected system were up all day, but it is impractical for any development work when the system (either of them) needs to be rebooted occasionally.

Is there any way of knocking a minute or so off the GRUB 1.5 load time ?

TIA

Red

Something is VERY wrong here. When I boot up, the time from the BIOS looking for a bootable something to the GRUB menu is maybe 1 second.

Do you get any messages while you are waiting for the grub menu?

Hopefully someone here has ideas on how to troubleshoot

Hi Pixellany
This is the sequence:
BIOS completes
"Grub Loading Stage1.5." time =00.00
"Grub Loading please wait" time =00.30
GRUB menu time =01.02

There are no other messages

This is the first time I have accurately timed the operation, it looks as though there are 2 x 30 second delays built in.

System is AMD2400 (2GHz) with 500MB on a ECS K7S5A Mobo which is about 4 years old but goes well enough for what I need once the OS is loaded.

Update:

I discovered that I could easily install LILO in place of GRUB and it works fast ! I'll worry some more about GRUB when I have nothing else to do.

Thanks for comments from one happy again user.

I have a similar problem. GRUB doesn't take that long but since I managed to do suspend-resume, it significantly slowed down even when I don't suspend-resume just reboot or shutdown. Reinstalling GRUB didn't make any difference.
I haven't tried LILO yet though.

Sorry, posted too quick:
The reason for the slow down was that my /home partition was ext3 while my root partition was reiserfs. Changing the /home partition back to reiserfs, GRUB is quick again..

Hi,
I had the same problem and in my case I came to suspect grub of wrongly reading my reiserfs filesystem- or checking the journal a long time or something like that.
As stated in grub documentation, it has to interpret every filesystem (ext2,3, reiserfs etc..)
Perhaps the version of reiserfs was too recent vs grub's implementation.

Anyway I solved it by creating a small /boot filesystem under a simple filesystem: ext2
moved all the files there and ran grub

root@t600:/boot/grub# grub
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)

and from there it booted fast again.

---
For those interested in the details, I created the partition /boot by reducing slightly my swap space:
swapoff -a,
then fdisk /dev/hda -> delete and recreate swap space minus 40M, created a new partition of 40M type "Linux" 83
mkfs.ext2 /dev/hda3 (in my case it' s the 3rd)
mkswap /dev/hda2 ; swapon -a
mv /boot /boot.orig
mkdir /boot
mount /dev/hda3 /boot
copy the files from /boot.orig to /boot
edit /etc/fstab to have it mounted at boot
then run grub (Note that now the paths have changed from:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21.3 etc...
to
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.21.3 etc..
in the /boot/grub/menu.lst

Hope it helps...