Noticable hang when loading grub

[Devin Torres]

I'm not sure if it's because I have grub installed in an IDE drive when I also
have a SATA drive connected to the computer, or what, but grub has a 30 second
hang right after "loading stage 1.5" and then another 30 second hang before
finally loading the menu. What's wrong? LILO has no hang at all, so what is grub
doing that makes it take so long? My motherboard is an Asus K8V Deluxe, but I'm
not sure if others are experiencing this problem because they own the same
motherboard. Perhaps it is searching for drives where it's not supposed to be?
I've contributed to grub before, but I still have no idea what's going on.

[Linuxg33k (linuxg33k)]

i have a problem with this as well and don't know what the fix might be.

i will try reinstalling.

[Jerome Lacoste (jerome-lacoste)]

I am having a very similar issue on a K8 system, SATA disk only, ubuntu 5.10 freshly installed.

I am not sure the hang is temporary (so far I don't think the user ever waited 30 secs) but there's a hang that happens at the same stage every now and then. Sometimes it doesn't hang and the boot goes through.

Can someone with the original issue confirm similar symptoms (i.e. not 100% reproducible).

[ilw (oneshot)]

I also have this problem on every boot, but without a SATA drive present. Searching google it seems the symptoms are similar for a variety of other people too, but it seems like a previous bug report was closed because there were other issues:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub/+bug/24707
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub/+bug/3245
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

i'm not sure if they're all the same cause (some people seem to trace it back to reiserfs, but again i don't think i have that?)

My System details
1GHz Compaq Presario 705ea
running feisty fawn
Linux ilw-laptop 2.6.20-15-generic #2 SMP Sun Apr 15 07:36:31 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/
partitions according to parted:
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
 1 32.3kB 38.9GB 38.9GB primary ext3 boot
 2 38.9GB 40.0GB 1110MB extended
 5 38.9GB 40.0GB 1110MB logical linux-swap

my menu.lst file for grub is attached if that helps, but its pretty much vanilla, out of the box ubuntu settings (I made an alternate boot option to run bootchart but the problem was there before and is still present after the change)

any more info you'd like just let me know

[tylerjwilk (tylerjwilk)]

I have this issue as well occasionally grub will just sit there at loading state 1.5 (the state before the menu comes up)

It seems (for me) to be related to bios checking the other media for bootablility.

For example if i hold F12 on bios boot and force it to boot to the hard disk therefore: not checking if there is bootable media in CDROM or DVD, it seems to always work.

for the record i have to SATA hard drives

[Melvin Garcia (virtualspectre8)]

In my Acer Aspire 5050-5410 this is a thing of the past. Since Beta 1 This issue has been fixed but thank you anyway.

[blanik (roygilby)]

Further information - problem also exists on kbuntu 9.10 using a /home partition formatted to reiserfs.

Using Kbuntu 9.10, I believe that I have the same issue on a Toshiba A200 Notebook (2 x SATA Drives). / partition is EXT4, and /home is REISERFS. There was no delay instarting the boot menu on any previous Ubuntu (9.04, 8.10, and 8.04) versions on this notebook, whereas under 9.10, it takes around 30 seconds to get the Grub menu displayed. During the installation of 9.10, the root partition was reformatted to EXT4, and the existing /home partition was left untouched as a reiserfs partition. The delay ranges from 20 seconds up to over two minutes - (timed against a watch, not guessed).

I'm reluctant to change the /home partition to another format (say ext4) to see if that fixes the problem, as I don't have anough spare disk capacity to backup /home prior to reformatting it.

Is there any confirmation that reiserfs is causing the problem?

[rusivi2 (rusivi2-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for reporting this bug.

Does this occur in Lucid?