Grub takes ~2 minutes to start (while loading the stages)

[magilus]

I installed Ubuntu Hoary on a friend's computer (Athlon 2800+; Asrock MB) a few weeks ago. On his computer Grub takes ~2 minutes till the os selection appears. So I searched and found out that some users have the same problem in Debian and that some users have the same problem in Ubuntu:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=23230
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=57390
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=51590
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=8789

A few days ago I installed Breezy RC on an other computer (Pentium 800 MHz) - the same bug appears.

Grub was installed in the MBR.

[Hidde Brugmans (hcbrugmans-deactivatedaccount)]

We really need more info to be able to help you.
What is the timeout in your /boot/grub/menu.list
What kind of harddisk are /boot and / on?
What kind of partition layout/filesystem are you using?

Neither of these forumthreads provide any insight into /what/ is causing this.
Any information you can give can help us narrow down the problem.

[magilus (magilus)]

The timeout is set to 10 seconds.
There is no extra partition for /boot, it's an IDE harddisk.
He uses ext3 as filesystem.

Maybe I can ask him to submit his data via Ubuntu Hardware Database submission. Then you know which hardware he has.

[synaptic revolt (jesse-escapeplan)]

I also have this problem.

Asus A7N8X Duluxe Motherboard
The drive is a 80 GB seagate.
The drive has three partitions, the first two are XP, the third is ext3 with /boot and /

I didn't start having the problem until I tried to change my kernel to K7, during the process, the boot record got hosed and I had to reinstall everything.

In addition, after the inital mess, grub would load, but it couldn't boot anything. It would try to load, and then tell me it couldn't find the partition, or the partition was wrong (I can't remember the exact error message, it's been a while since this happened). During this time, I could only boot XP by leaving my install cd in the drive, but not booting off of it. I guess this somehow bypassed the MBR on the harddrive. I never tried to fix the ubuntu install because I was tired of messing with it. When breezy came out, I nuked the partition and reinstalled, but am still having the ~2 minute wait :|

[synaptic revolt (jesse-escapeplan)]

forgot to mention that after breezy install, I don't have the wait if I leave the XP cd in, but don't boot off of it and let grub do it's thing.

The errors if I don't leave the cd in are Error 22: No Partition when booting linux, and Error 12: Invalid Device Requested when trying to boot XP.

HTH.

[magilus (magilus)]

His hardware entry id is e46adeebb79a72a3225c1c8bf8fff95d

[Jeroen (jeroenubuntu)]

http://hwdb.ubuntu.com/?xml=e46adeebb79a72a3225c1c8bf8fff95d

 Vendor: AuthenticAMD
Speed: 2087.940 MHz
Model: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2800+
  Memory: 1556 MB
Swap: 465 MB
  Videodriver: "nvidia"
Colordepth: 24
Videomodes: "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1280x854" "1280x800" "1280x768" "1200x800" "1152x864" "1152x768" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
Videoram: 131072 kByte

[magilus (magilus)]

Guys, his mainboard had some other faults, i.e. his time was not saved correctly. He reclaimed his motherboard and got a new one (same model). The new one does not have this problem, I think that it was caused by a defect on the mainboard. I will close.

[Peter Makowski (petermakowski)]

I don't think it's a hardware problem - I have the same problem on the other mainboard, too (with the Intel Celeron processor). The grub takes ages to load.

[Peter Makowski (petermakowski)]

With the attached configuration the bug occurs.

[trollord (trollenlord)]

BadCRC means that the kernel detected that data is being corrupted somewhere between the computer and drive.

99% of these cases are due hardware that has failed or is starting to fail. The only other possibilities usually are mis-configuring DMA mode from BIOS, or having two incompatible (different capabilities, eg.ata133 and ata66 or only impartial support for such) drives on a split ide cable.

What GRUB attempts to do is to use the simplest possible ways to obtain data from the HDD. If there are problems already in that phase, it really is not fixable in any way other than changing hardware. Sorry for your loss.

[magilus (magilus)]

Was a bug in GRUB for me. On both computers, installing a newer release of Ubuntu / GRUB fixed the problem.