My Linux Mint17 installed on an old HD in a Pentium4 3.4GHz machine seems very slow to boot - about 6 mins. It is dual boot with WindowsXP on a much faster drive.
Does the attached boot.log give any clues or is the HD too slow?

Attached Files

Linux bootlog.txt (5.0 KB, 20 views)

you need to try dmesg to see the boot log.

I've got Linux Mint 17 on my system, Asus M5A78L-M USB3 mobo, AMD FX6300 processor plus 8Gb memory. Like you, it takes a long time to boot, about 4 mins I think. There's a long period of time when it looks like nothing's happening; no disk activity, nothing on screen then it bursts back into life and finishes booting. I haven't done much research into why yet though I've installed a boot logger which graphs the boot process and presents it as a .png file (If I could only remember what it was called!! I'm sure one of the guys here will help out with the name.)

Play Bonny!

I found the file that I attached by looking in /var/log/boot.log. Would that be the same as dmesg that pan64 suggested?

just execute dmesg and you will see the difference

Further to my previous post, download bootchart using synaptic package manager and read the instructions. Everytime you boot the system it'll generate a bootchart.png file in /var/log/bootchart, for example:
(Note the date stamp!)

Open with something like Image Viewer to check your results.

Thanks to yancec for originally bringing this to my notice.

Play Bonny!

I have installed bootchart and tried to attach the resulting .png file. How can I attach this file as it 722Kb which is too large.
Also I have now installed Linux Mint17 in a partition on the faster hard drive. It also takes 6 mins to boot - just marginally quicker.

I have tried dmesg, but how do you interpret it? It gives many lines of numbers.

Just attach it to your next post, so that we can have a look at it.

Attached is the result of dmesg.

Attached Files

dmesg result.txt (24.3 KB, 25 views)

This can't be the complete dmesg output, there must be much more. At this point your system is already running for 320 seconds, we need to get back further in that log to see what holds the boot for so long (though it seems that your network card might be involved).

Sorry, I missed off the top. Attached is the result of another dmesg.

Attached Files

dmesg result2.txt (24.3 KB, 12 views)

That still isn't the complete dmesg output, try it with to get the complete output. We are now only one second further back in the log, still not enough.

Done dmesg > dmsg-result.txt and attached the file. Previously I had just copied the terminal output to a Linux text edit file.

Attached Files

dmseg-result.txt (92.1 KB, 27 views)

OK, it seems that there is a problem with your network card or its driver.
Does the network card work reliably in Windows? If so it is possible that this is a driver problem. It may help to try an older or newer kernel, to see if this is a regression or probably already fixed in a newer kernel version.