2-minute delay before kernel is loaded

[Łukasz Halman]

Hi

This problem was present in breezy and later fixed after my bugreport, now it's back. I have KT400 motherboard with second Promise PDC20276 on-board IDE controller. I have 2.6.15-17-k7 kernel. During booting, when I choose option in grub it takes whole 2 minutes before "Uncompressing kernel..." message will show up.

This behaviour was caused in breezy by EDD [Enhanced Disk Drive calls] being enabled. EDD is considered experimental feature, not implemented on most IDE controllers and known to fail to boot on various systems.

If that's the case in dapper, please disable this option. It doesn't make any good.

[Daniel James (daniel-netbreeze)]

I wonder if this has anything to do with this bug: #6550

[Daniel James (daniel-netbreeze)]

Sorry.. should paste the full url to the bug that I'm referring to:

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/6550/

[Łukasz Halman (lukasz-halman)]

In my case system starts to boot after 2 minutes. Exactly 120 seconds. It's been the same with first breezy kernel. I know the exact kernel option (CONFIG_EDD) which is responsible for this.

It was fixed in breezy now it's back.

[Ben Collins (ben-collins)]

Thanks. This explains a lot of other bug reports I've seen to this affect.

[Daniel James (daniel-netbreeze)]

Just a quick comment. After removing the EDD from my kernel, everything boots cleanly. I was having trouble even booting before that (not just a 2 minute delay).

[Łukasz Halman (lukasz-halman)]

I investigated this problem further. It is caused by a bios bug, on my particular motherboard (ga-vaxp) downgrading to F4 version resolves the issue.

However, as EDD doesn't do anything good and is mostly unsupported by hardware anyway, it should be off in default kernel. Having you computer not booting after successful installation is major bug.

[Mikel Ward (mikelward)]

Lack of EDD seems to be causing bug 8497, which also stops the computer booting because GRUB is looking for the wrong hard drive if you have multiple hard disks.