[SOLVED] From 2 days ago, it takes 10 min.s to boot my HP dv9700 laptop. Prior two yr.s, 2 min
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From 2 days ago, it takes 10 min.s to boot my HP dv9700 laptop. Prior two yr.s, 2 min
Once I boot, everything seems to work well. Note that this does not seem to be OS dependent. Once the GRUB menu is displayed, all seems fine, and I can boot any of the OS on the system with no problem. (I have Ubuntu 9, Fedora 14, and Vista on sda and Ubuntu 10 on sdb).
sda is a 160Gb Fujitsu, and sdb a 500 Gb Samsung.
What I've checked:
Memchk (4Gb) - Passed
Code:
$ sudo smartctl -H /dev/sda
smartctl 5.40 2010-10-16 r3189 [x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
$ sudo smartctl -H /dev/sdb
smartctl 5.40 2010-10-16 r3189 [x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
I seems to me that it system is waiting for some interrupt, and that it takes about five minutes for the wait to time out. The only interrupts of which I'm aware that take that long are disk access ones, but, as you can see, above, SMART seems to think there's no problem with the drives. (And, once booted, they seem to work well.)
Does anyone have any suggestions?
In case it might help, here's the lshw output for the laptop:
Interesting idea, but no. I get the same "hang" before the CD is booted. After boot, no problem.
For what it's worth, the BIOS has been updated to F.30 (IIRC), which is the latest update offered by HP, and that was done at least a year ago. (In fact, so long ago that I've forgotten the BIOS access password.)
It seems likely that some hardware is delaying the POST. Could be a NIC or a data cable or even a USB controller. I would do more of what paulsm4 talked about. Get into the BIOS and selectively disable things to see if one of those items was hanging the POST. Also if you have an add on NIC then remove it. Just disable different items to see if the POST->boot speeds up.
Even more mystery: I realized that I'd just assumed that F.30 was the most recent BIOS release, so I checked the HP site, and discovered that F.33 was available. So I downloaded it, moved it to my Vista partition (Since HP ONLY supports BIOS flashing from a Windows OS.) and then rebooted.
And here's the mystery: the reboot went as fast as it had before the problem of the last two days! (That's before the BIOS upgrade was applied.) I then upgraded the BIOS - why not, eh? - and rebooted again.
And, again, no problem. How long the problem will be gone is hard to guess.
My suspicion is that I have a flakey drive that SMART is not detecting, and so I think I'll replace the old 160Gb drive with a newer 500Gb one. (Ebay suggests that a 500Gb laptop drive should go for $45-$75. Now all I need to do is find the money. Maybe next year . . .)
But for now the problem seems to have resolved itself.
I think I may have finally solved this problem:
<edit>
Well, I thought that solved it. But see below.
</edit>
I seems that the libata version 3.00 is issuing a "reset" to the DVD-RW device attached as PATA 5, and the device is not responding, perhaps because I don't, normally, have anything in it when I boot.
Anyhow, when I added a libata.force=0x30c0:norst to the kernel boot parameters the boot "hang" dropped from 2 min.s to 5 seconds.
Here's the before messages:
Code:
# grep -iw "Dec 28.*ata[5-6]" /var/log/messages
Dec 28 07:50:47 dv9810us kernel: [ 7.346903] ata5: PATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x1f0 ctl 0x3f6 bmdma 0x30c0 irq 14
Dec 28 07:50:47 dv9810us kernel: [ 7.346907] ata6: PATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0x30c8 irq 15
Dec 28 07:50:47 dv9810us kernel: [ 12.395031] ata5: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
Dec 28 07:50:47 dv9810us kernel: [ 17.393030] ata5: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset
Dec 28 07:50:47 dv9810us kernel: [ 22.593029] ata5: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
Dec 28 07:50:47 dv9810us kernel: [ 27.438032] ata5: SRST failed (errno=-16)
Dec 28 07:50:47 dv9810us kernel: [ 32.638031] ata5: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
Dec 28 07:50:47 dv9810us kernel: [ 37.483029] ata5: SRST failed (errno=-16)
Dec 28 07:50:47 dv9810us kernel: [ 42.683030] ata5: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
Dec 28 07:50:47 dv9810us kernel: [ 72.518030] ata5: SRST failed (errno=-16)
Dec 28 07:50:47 dv9810us kernel: [ 77.565029] ata5: SRST failed (errno=-16)
Dec 28 07:50:47 dv9810us kernel: [ 77.565081] ata5: reset failed, giving up
and the "after" messages:
Code:
Dec 28 08:38:20 dv9810us kernel: [ 4.718439] ata5: PATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x1f0 ctl 0x3f6 bmdma 0x30c0 irq 14
Dec 28 08:38:20 dv9810us kernel: [ 4.718449] ata6: PATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0x30c8 irq 15
Dec 28 08:38:20 dv9810us kernel: [ 9.767032] ata5: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
Dec 28 08:38:20 dv9810us kernel: [ 14.765030] ata5: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset
Dec 28 08:38:20 dv9810us kernel: [ 14.919368] ata5.00: ATAPI: PIONEER DVDRW DVR-K17B, 1.02, max MWDMA2
Dec 28 08:38:20 dv9810us kernel: [ 14.925306] ata5.00: configured for MWDMA2
<edit>
Well, the next time I booted, the problem was still there. But, now that I'd found out that ATA5 was the DVDRW, I did a bit of experimentation and discovered that the DVD drive was acting very flakey. Basically, the only time the boot went well was when the BIOS finds the DVD device, which it hasn't done very often. Of course, when the BIOS "thinks" it's not there, it's not accessible.
Bottom line: The problem now seems to be related to a failing DVD drive.
</edit>
Last edited by PTrenholme; 12-31-2010 at 11:08 AM.
Reason: New Information
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From 2 days ago, it takes 10 min.s to boot my HP dv9700 laptop. Prior two yr.s, 2 min
