[vox-tech] Extremely slow bootup

[Brian Lavender]

On Sun, May 01, 2011 at 11:53:10AM -0500, Chanoch (Ken) Bloom wrote:
> My laptop is running Debian's 2.6.38-2-amd64 kernel, and when booting it
> today, I discovered it was extremely slow to boot up (like 5 to 10
> minutes). There's no particular obvious culprit -- it just seems each of
> the initscripts takes longer. When debugging I tried to debug this, I
> noticed that programs are also slow to load. The system is also very
> slow to shut down. Again, there's no particular obvious culprit -- it
> just seems each of the initscripts takes longer.

Here are my initial thoughts.

Sounds like a hardware problem to me. What about running a drive io test?
What does syslog say as far as kernel messages? 

And, what about booting with a rescue/standalone disk? Does that go just as
slow?

Seeing how disks are so cheap, you could buy another Hard Drive, drop it in,
see how it performs, and then just use it in an external enclosure.

But, there could be other problems I suppose? Is there something that would 
cause an "interrupt" that would cause the system to hang? I had a system that
had software flow control on the serial consoles and it would hang that
program. Could your tty be blocking?

brian
-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture