[NBLUG/talk] Problems booting Ubuntu 8.10 after maintenance

[Troy Arnold]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 12:59:20PM -0800, Steve Bursch wrote:
> All:
> 
> After I made the change to the menu.lst file (by adding "rootdelay=130"
> to the kernel entry), the machine now boots every time successfully.  Go
> figure.  My plan going forward is to keep a watchful eye for signs of HD
> failure.

Keep a watchful ear too.  Specifically, listen for any difference in the
sound the drive makes as it spins up.  If you pay close attention, you
should be able to hear the drive initialize and spin up.  If it sounds
different or takes varying amounts of time from boot to boot, than it's
likely something with the physical drive mechanism and its days are
numbered even if it shows no media errors.

I limped along for a year or two on an old drive that would occasionally
fail to initialize.  The thing never did quit entirely despite horrible
grinding noises at spin up and "Imminent Failure" notices from smartctl.
It was just a boot drive and rarely used windows partition, so recovery
would have been quick, but I wouldn't recommend ignoring the issue for as
long as I did.

Personally, I'd go nuts if I had to wait an extra 130 seconds every time I
booted my desktop :)

Related to all this...

While searching this morning for "linux kernel command line reference", I
ran across chapter 9 of Greg Kroah-Hartman's _Linux Kernel in a Nutshell_ :

http://www.kroah.com/lkn/

-t