A couple of weeks ago I tried Ubuntu 8.10, my first Linux install. After some difficulties, I got it installed, but it booted very slowly (3-5 minutes), and no one in the Ubuntu community could offer a fix- so I decided to try openSuse. The install was a dream, everything went right the first time- but I still have some slow boot problems. The boot messages are much clearer, though- it appears that the problem is with ata1.00 (sometimes just referred to as ata1). The boot screen says the device responds slowly, be patient, then says it’s status is “-16”, forces a hard reset, pauses, forces a soft reset, says it’s configured for UDMA, and then does the whole sequence three more times. Finally, it says it has configured the device for DMA 100, then completes the boot cycle. After that, everything seems fine.
The drive is a brand new Western Digital caviar, which works fine under WIndows XP.
Anybody know what the problem is? Do I need a special driver? Is there some hardware issue here. (I have an HP with an AMD Athlon 3400+ 64bit processor).
I will say this for openSUSE- even though it is clearly experiencing a problem related to the ubuntu problem, it chews through it in about a minute instead of 3 to 5 minutes. Without the problem, boot time looks like it would be about 15 seconds!
i scanned the hits but didn’t quickly find “the” answer, but i don’t
have the problem (or the WD drive) but you might scan longer and
deeper and/or “tune” the search string and find “the” answer is as
simple as (say) adding a kernel boot switch, or early loading of a
kernel module, or adjustment of a BIOS setting–the string i googled
on was:
linux “Western Digital caviar” UDMA “slow boot”
however, even when you find “the” answer i don’t expect you will get
down to a 15 second boot…close maybe (mine is about 62 seconds out
of the box) and there are many other things that can be done to
shorten the cycle…
Watch for the initial POST (Power On Self Test) messages when you switch on the machine, You may have to use a key like F2 or Del to bring up the BIOS configuration screen. Sometimes what key to be pressed will be displayed on the screen when the POST is running.
Thanks- I’ll try that. I somehow quzzled the boot loader, though- I just turned on the machine and it went straight to WinXP. I was thinking of jumpering the hd to master instead of cable-detect, think that might help? I am currently hacking up my lungs, though, and this all may have to wait till tomorrow.