[sclug] veeeerrrrryyyy looooong delay booting (initrd)

[Ed Davies]

John Stumbles wrote:
> My nipper's dapper box is now (after he's messed around with it trying 
> to install a 2nd hdd and reinstalling the OS) taking about half an hour 
> to boot up. (It worked OK when he first installed it)
> 
> It seems to hang shortly after grub at the stage of
> initrd [loading] /boot/initrd.something or other
> (I didn't write down the message but I recall the initrd and 
> /boot/whatever bit)
> 
> wassup? I thought initrd sets up a ram disk and loads an image of a 
> basic OS into it to then do the bootup. What could be causing it to take 
> forever?

Dunno if this could be even slightly related but my Ubuntu
system takes a while (minute or two) to boot.  It pauses at
the "mounting root filesystem" (I think that's the message)
stage.  It did it with Hoary Hedgehog and still does it with
Dapper (somewhat to me disappointment - the hope that it
would be fixed was a minor contribution to the decision to
upgrade).

I think it's because I have my disks on a UDMA card - not
on either of the IDE buses on the motherboard.  /dev/hda &
b don't exist.  The CD drives are /dev/hdc & d and the hard
disks are /dev/hde & f.  My suspicion is that the system is
taking a lot of time to give up probing the motherboard
IDEs.  This is only a guess, though.

It's not terribly broken but any hints for diagnosis/fix
would be appreciated and might overlap with those for John's
problem.

Ed.