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Unusually long boot times with high disk usage ...

Hi all

I am often having very long boot times with my laptop (i7 2nd Gen, running Kubuntu 11.10 x64). I did not face this problem with any previous installation.
I changed the boot line to remove splash and see where the boot process was getting stuck - the computer sort of hangs after all the startup scripts are run and then there are 2 lines "fsck from util-linux" after a very long time after which everything proceeds normally. The HDD LED stays bright all the time.
I assumed fsck was being run everytime so I manually changed the parameters using tune2fs to run it every 2 weeks, but still the problem persists.

Here's a portion of dmesg

Code:

[    2.885315] sr 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 5

[    3.203399] ata5: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)

[    3.217984] input: USB Optical Mouse as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.3/0000:04:0

0.0/usb3/3-2/3-2:1.0/input/input7

[    3.219010] generic-usb 0003:0461:4D81.0001: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [U

SB Optical Mouse] on usb-0000:04:00.0-2/input0

[    3.220005] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid

[    3.220960] usbhid: USB HID core driver

[    5.686966] EXT4-fs (sda7): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null

)

[  61.443087] udevd[411]: starting version 173

[  61.505992] lp: driver loaded but no devices found

[  61.729432] Adding 3807228k swap on /dev/sda6.  Priority:-1 extents:1 across:38072

28k 

[  61.830356] acpi_call: Module loaded successfully

[  62.201285] mei: module is from the staging directory, the quality is unknown, you have been warned.

[  62.201634] mei 0000:00:16.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16

[  62.201642] mei 0000:00:16.0: setting latency timer to 64

Please advise me how should I solve this issue.

TIA :)

Long shot here and its more to satisfy my curiosity than anything but have you disabled ureadahead? Try doing that, or remove it altogether, and let us know what the result is.

^ It seems ureadahead was the culprit. Great advice , you have my thanks.

I removed the pack files but then instead of retracing I got a Status 5 error message - but the boot was fast - so I removed the whole package using apt. Now the system boots to the login screen in <15 seconds from GRUB , although the time after login to desktop screen is increased by about 5-odd seconds (this was expected I guess), but this is most satisfying.

Thanks again.

Ah, goes to show they still haven't fixed the thing. ureadahead was one of the, many, reasons I ditched Ubuntu and eventually moved to Debian. I fought with it for along time and recommended people remove it, a thread was started at Ubuntu Forums by the developer in response to my recommendations. Still after a couple of years it can obviously cripple a computer.