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    #1

    Long Failing Boot After Installing

    Here we go

    For two days now I have been trying to install Kubuntu on my external hard drive which had a Mint 7 installation that worked just fine. The thing is, the install is going fine but after that everything goes downhill.

    Anyway, here are the problems I'm facing:
    • I reach GRUB no problem but when I choose Ubuntu 9.10 (the first one) and press enter it takes about a minute to exit grub, then about 20 seconds to reach boot screen and then 30 'till I reach KDM.

    • After I type in my user name and password I press enter and in the middle of the login screen everything goes black with my courser shaped like a black X with white outline in the center of the screen. When that happens nothing works, not “Ctrl+Alt+Delete”, not “Ctrl+Alt+Backspace”, not even the virtual terminals. I have to do a hard reboot which makes my hard drive useless for a while.


    When I (barely) entered recovery mode I tried to start X and I got a whole screen of EXT3-fs error device (sdb5) something about not reading something; I should've written it down, I know. At first I thought my hard drive was failing. I ran the Knoppix Live CD/USB to check it and it was fine.

    For the love of everything that computes I cannot solve this puzzle. Why is it doing this? Is it because I installed it from a USB stick? Is it because of GRUB2? Is it because of something faulty in (K)ubuntu?

    Any help is welcome. Thanks.

    P.S. I installed Kubuntu 9.04 and it went fine. I think this happens only in the 9.10 releases.
    Tags: None
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    #2
    Re: Long Failing Boot After Installing

    This has happened to me after a power failure several times, both with reiserfs and ext3 boot partitions.

    My bet would be that you have somehow corrupted the boot filesystem. Lucky you, ext3 is journaled, so probably the filesystem can be restored to a workable state at mount time, at the cost of some lengthy operation to restore sanity on the filesystem structures. Each time the partition is mounted, such as when grub loads or when you choose the boot OS, the ext3 log is replayed so it is in coherent state and things can continue.

    Or at least that's my interpretation. My fix is always the same. Boot, if you're impatient boot on recovery mode and do a sync. Still under my interpretation, this flushes the filesystem transaction logs and records as permanent the changes that are being played back each time the filesystem is mounted. Always works for me, your mileage may vary.
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      #3
      Re: Long Failing Boot After Installing

      Thank you for replying. Most of your post did not register (I'm not very tech savvy. I've been using Linux on and off) but what I got is there might be a fix as you mentioned. This sync thingy, is there a command or something I should type in?

      Thanks again.
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        #4
        Re: Long Failing Boot After Installing

        Be patient enough to boot, open a Konsole and then type

        sudo sync


        You'll be prompted by your password, type it and press Enter.

        Then reboot again and see if it improves.
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          #5
          Re: Long Failing Boot After Installing

          OK, I'm on it. Thanks.
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            #6
            Re: Long Failing Boot After Installing

            No dice. The sync command doesn't help. Although I did manage to run X for a little while and then I kept getting the same error as before: EXT4-fs error (device sdb5): ext4_find_entry: reading directory # (some random number) offset 0.

            Does this help?
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              #7
              Re: Long Failing Boot After Installing

              Googling your error message gave me this bug report

              https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/389154

              Worringly, the bug has not been updated in 4 months. I was not aware of corruption issues with ext4, but this looks serious enough to try your install with ext3.
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                #8
                Re: Long Failing Boot After Installing

                Same thing happens with EXT3. This is not the first installation. I tried installing different partitions with different filesystems. None of it helps. I feel hesitant about pursuing the solution to this problem. Maybe the next release will fix this. I don't know.

                Thanks for replying.
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                  #9
                  Re: Long Failing Boot After Installing

                  Just for grins, why not do a check on the filesystem, see if a routine "repair" might help.

                  For example, boot from GParted Live CD, highlight the bad partition, right-click, Check.

                  Or, manually:
                  File system: check and repair
                  http://members.iinet.net.au/%7Eherma...xt3_filesystem
                  An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. Charles Bukowski
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                    #10
                    Re: Long Failing Boot After Installing

                    Did all that when I was in Knoppix. Besides if there was anything wrong with the fylesystem or the hard drive I wouldn't be able to run Kubuntu 9.04 at all.
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                      #11
                      Re: Long Failing Boot After Installing

                      Output sudo fdisk -l so we see what HD's are involved.

                      Ideally I would like to see everything so I would suggest running the boot-info-script so we the entire boot process and all associated files.

                      The result of running that script is found in RESULTS.txt
                      Boot Info Script
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                        #12
                        Re: Long Failing Boot After Installing

                        OK. I booted from the 9.10 Live USB and here's the output:

                        Code:
                        Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd711d711

  Device Boot   Start     End   Blocks  Id System
/dev/sda1  *      1     13   102400  7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2       13    5099  40853504  7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3      5100    60801  447426315  f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda5      5100    60801  447426283+  7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 8086 MB, 8086618112 bytes
249 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1023 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15438 * 512 = 7904256 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00077e26

  Device Boot   Start     End   Blocks  Id System
/dev/sdb1  *      1    1023   7896506  b W95 FAT32
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
   phys=(1023, 248, 62) logical=(1022, 248, 62)

Disk /dev/sdc: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd548d05d

  Device Boot   Start     End   Blocks  Id System
/dev/sdc1  *      1     19   152586  83 Linux
/dev/sdc2       20    7945  63665595  5 Extended
/dev/sdc5       20    1356  10739421  83 Linux
/dev/sdc6      1357    7678  50781433+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdc7      7679    7945   2144646  82 Linux swap / Solaris
                        Hope this helps somehow.
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                          #13
                          Re: Long Failing Boot After Installing

                          Your USB stick is /dev/sdb. It has a bootable MBR on it. If /dev/sdc is your external hard drive, then the boot sequence is going to try the USB stick first.

                          Hint: "boot by UUID" will probably fix this situation.
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                            #14
                            Re: Long Failing Boot After Installing

                            I take the USB stick out before I boot from the ext HDD. I don't know what you mean by boot by UUID but GRUB2 seems to boot using UUID by default. Otherwise it wouldn't find GRUB at all and display some sort of error.

                            At least that's what I think.
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                              #15
                              Re: Long Failing Boot After Installing

                              I'll drop this reminder, a bug that affects slow boot times on multi-disk systems:
                              https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...b2/+bug/420933
                              That may address the slowness part of this problem.
                              Hasn't been fixed for 9.10 (except by PPA), will be in 10.04 repos.
                              An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. Charles Bukowski
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