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**lmilano** · Jan 05, 2010, 07:24 PM

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

I don't see anything fishy, have you tried specifying that particular partition the old way in fstab?

Code:

/dev/sda12 /home      reiserfs defaults    0    2

I suspect it's some bug in the reiserfs support in karmic, similar to this one:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1170480

Hope this works!

**51m0n** · Jan 06, 2010, 06:27 AM

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Havent tried that, largely cos it can be several different partitions that have the issue one after another.

Did find a work 'through' process though.

If I hit esc, drop to the prompt I can do:-

umount -a
umount -a

(have to do it twice to properly unmount everything - why?)

fsck

Then respond with Yes on every file system it checks, then it always boots OK after a ctrl-D back into the boot process.

This is odd, anything like that before used to fix itself. Now it seems a shutdown can leave no errors but not umount the drives properly always, and then the boot cant fix them automatically. Point to note, I have never seen this version manage to automatically attempt to fix the filesystems (very obvious in reiserfs when this is happening). Could that be broken?

It certainly doesnt seem connected to the other issue, this one is sporadic for a start. With as many resierfs partitions as I have I'd never mount anything if that were the case, but as I said about 2 out of 5 boots gets all the way through without a problem.

**lmilano** · Jan 06, 2010, 07:06 AM

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

I think you are on the right track. Still, there is a chance that at mount time some partitions are not found by UUID hence not checked, I would definitely try my suggestion, at least with /home, and go from there ... keep in mind that the init scripts were changed recently in ubuntu (http://upstart.ubuntu.com/), and there is a chance there are still some things off. You may want to report this in launchpad, too!

**vinnywright** · Jan 06, 2010, 02:37 PM

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

I'm thinking you may just have to meney partition's on that drive .....check out this....... figure D-7 and the caption under it.

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/e...artitions.html

VINNY

**51m0n** · Jan 06, 2010, 05:52 PM

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Interesting read, however this partition table has worked fine for years with a wide variety of distros, some Mandrake, some Debian, some (k)ubuntu. Why would it be now that there is an issue?

Also given the size of drives these days, and the multibooting options, 12 partitions seems a paltry number to me, and a major flaw IMO.

**51m0n** · Jan 06, 2010, 05:55 PM

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Originally posted by lmilano

I think you are on the right track. Still, there is a chance that at mount time some partitions are not found by UUID hence not checked, I would definitely try my suggestion, at least with /home, and go from there ... keep in mind that the init scripts were changed recently in ubuntu (http://upstart.ubuntu.com/), and there is a chance there are still some things off. You may want to report this in launchpad, too!

Cheers for the link!

That's exactly what I've been looking for. If I read through that I may just manage to get to the bottom of this one. Or at least ask the right questions

In the meantime I will have a look at swapping out the fstab for one using old stylee paths.

**dibl** · Jan 06, 2010, 06:53 PM

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Here are a couple of useful links for hard drive size and partitioning questions:

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_d...e_barriers.htm

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/...titions-c.html

The maximum number of partitions (primary + extended) is 24, so you're OK there.

reiserfs was once the best performing filesystem available for Linux, but it is suffering badly from lack of maintenance (several years now). As the Linux kernel continues to be developed, reiserfs becomes an ever less desirable filesystem choice. I'm having good luck with ext4, and jfs on my 64-bit system. If you're conservative, you can stick with ext3, but I would not advise clinging to reiserfs if you value your data.

**51m0n** · Jan 06, 2010, 07:03 PM

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Originally posted by lmilano

I think you are on the right track. Still, there is a chance that at mount time some partitions are not found by UUID hence not checked, I would definitely try my suggestion, at least with /home, and go from there ... keep in mind that the init scripts were changed recently in ubuntu (http://upstart.ubuntu.com/), and there is a chance there are still some things off. You may want to report this in launchpad, too!

OH NO!!!

Tried reverting fstab to old style stuff for / and /home

Turns out that was a BIG mistake. Machine now never boots. I saved a copy of the original and used the resue disk to replace what I'd done, and guess what, it still never boots

wtf!

This is just getting worse and worse now

Any suggestions before I go distro hunting for something current that will boot on my system and cope with my crappy Broadcom chipset?

**51m0n** · Jan 06, 2010, 07:05 PM

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Originally posted by dibl

Here are a couple of useful links for hard drive size and partitioning questions:

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_d...e_barriers.htm

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/...titions-c.html

The maximum number of partitions (primary + extended) is 24, so you're OK there.

reiserfs was once the best performing filesystem available for Linux, but it is suffering badly from lack of maintenance (several years now). As the Linux kernel continues to be developed, reiserfs becomes an ever less desirable filesystem choice. I'm having good luck with ext4, and jfs on my 64-bit system. If you're conservative, you can stick with ext3, but I would not advise clinging to reiserfs if you value your data.

Yeah I need to move on from reiserfs, but unfortunately when I dabbled in ext3 it was terribly slow, I mean just a huge drop off compared to reiser. Have they fixed that now?

**dibl** · Jan 06, 2010, 07:25 PM

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

This is pretty much the classic Linux filesystem benchmarking test:

http://linuxgazette.net/122/TWDT.html#piszcz

ext3 is a bit slower than reiserfs for some usage cases. Some like XFS, which did seem fast to me, but don't use it for the root filesystem, only use it for data. I like jfs for my 64-bit desktop -- jfs is the only native 64-bit Linux filesystem. ext4 has been working fine here for 6 months or more. I would encourage you to use all those partitions for some testing of your own.

**geezer** · Jan 06, 2010, 07:58 PM

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Had the same problem. Don't know if the cause is the same though.

On upgrading to KK I was getting boot message that the boot was waiting on '/home' which was on a separate partition.

The boot message was occurring once in a while at first and then coming more often. Finally, '/home' couldn't be mounted during boot.

Turned out that some partitions were being mounted previous to '/home' on a hard disk that was failing.

Windows Vista never saw the problem because the failing disk had a fat32 partition which was working and all the rest was Linux file systems as is '/home'. Windows just ignored all of the failing Linux file system partitions, so never spotted anything wrong with the hard disk.

Finally had the shop run a disk analysis on all the Hard disks and that spotted the failing hard disk. Replaced the hard disk and everything worked again. I think there is disk analysis s/w available. It might be worthwhile to get some and run against your hard disks.

Don't know why the problem showed up right after the KK installation. Maybe the problem was there all along and something in KK was finding it, maybe the fstab mount order got changed, maybe the disk picked that time to start failing, maybe .... ??

**lmilano** · Jan 06, 2010, 07:59 PM

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Quite frankly the proposition was only to use the old format for /home, your / was being read correctly. Anyway, sorry it didn't work! Ext4 is certainly fast, if you search for articles in phoronix for instance you'll see it is overall very solid performance wise (some other fs can beat it here or there, but overall it's always at the top or very close in most tests).

**51m0n** · Jan 06, 2010, 08:37 PM

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

OK got it back via recovery mode.

Dont know whats going on here at all. This is currently the flakiest any distro has ever been on this machine.

Could be a failing harddrive I suppose. Any of you know of any more robust hard drive testing software than comes as standard in windows?

A Surface Test reports no errors at all on any partition (inc linux ones).

Really grasping at straws here.

I upgraded to the latest kernel, see if that behaves any better with booting, of course 2 minutes into my first log on I had a hard X crash (lovely stripy pattern on the screen) - thats nice!

Any body got any more suggestions around boot order, or is the general consensus that reiserfs is effectively deprecated and I'm not going to get any joy till I get away from it?

**dibl** · Jan 06, 2010, 08:43 PM

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Originally posted by 51m0n

of course 2 minutes into my first log on I had a hard X crash

That raises the possibility that there's more than a hard drive issue here ...

Did you boot the Live CD and test the hardware a bit with it? Networking, video, stuff like that? It has happened in the past that a failing hard drive that Windows was happy to live with showed up as problematic in Linux, so you might consider a little hardware testing, beyond hdd surface test. memtest86 run overnight would be a good start, IMHO.

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