DSL is booting very slowly

[klawischnigg]

Hi there,


I installed DSL on a SSD which I put in an about 15 yrs old Acer Aspire (2GB RAM).

Eveything is working, but the booting process needs more than 10 minutes. No error messages. 
Any suggestions what could go wrong or where I can get more information about this problem?

thx in advance

[nortti]

Does the boot process get stuck on any specific step, or does every step you see just take a long time? Once the system is booted, is it sluggish?

[klawischnigg]

The blue screen from the grub-boot-manager appears immediately, then for about 1 second two or three lines with some messages or commands and then happens nothing for about 10 minutes, only a blinking cursor can be seen in the upper left corner of the screen.

Once booted, the system is behaving as expected, I would say, even fast for such an old machine...

[rufwoof]

Fatdog uses a similar initrd, high (xz) compressed sfs (linuxfs), and aufs. I've noticed historically that initrd reading and general start up can at times be painfully slow for one installation, that 'moving' (reinstalling) can 'fix'. No idea why one install (initrd location) might be so slow to load, whereas the same moved elsewhere is quick to load. Maybe some for of boundary alignment issue. So basically ... try removing and recopying the files again and see if that magically boots much quicker. You may have to try that several times.

DSL is far from small, its a highly compressed sfs that is even larger than Fatdog. Such high compression is initially slow to be read/decompressed the first time a file/program is read, but quicker on subsequent reads when hopefully the file/data has remained in cache.

[John]

10 minutes is highly unusual. Is there a chance your hard drive is failing?

Maybe check out the results of:
sudo smartctl --health /dev/sda
(replace sda with what ever your hard drive is on your system)

[klawischnigg]

No chance, the hard drive is not failing. It's a pretty new SSD. And, besides that, it is working perfectly in another computer.

But maybe this is the reason for the problems - I installed DSL on this SSD - but during the installation the SSD was in a complete different Computer (which of course was a lot faster with much more RAM than the 15 years old Acer laptop) and after the installation I put the SSD in the mentioned laptop. With Linux normally no problem.

However, I'll try to reinstall DSL directly on the laptop, maybe this will solve my little problems - I'll report and thx for answering...

[John]

Please let me know what happens.

[klawischnigg]

Hm, doesn't work. This seems to be a machine-specific bug.

The booting procedure from the usb-stick needs also about 10 minutes, so for obvious reasons I didn't try to install it on the SSD again.
The lag is beetween the menu (I choose "failsave boot") and the procedure where you can read "start init".

The computer is ok, there are no problems to boot linux mint or fedora. The model is an ACER Aspire 1410 with a Celeron 723 and 2 GB RAM. Maybe I have to change something in the bios-setup, although I have no idea what setting this could be. However, if I find a solution, I'll report it here...

[John]

Okay, thanks for letting me know. I wondering if a particular firmware the ACER benefits from. You may want to see what happens after installing firmware-misc-nonfree, it is a big one with lots of hardware support.