I have just installed Zorin 17 alongside Zorin 16 and dual boot using Grub. Booting has never been rapid but since the install It now stands at over 3 minutes from pressing the return at the Grub menu to the presentation of login. It takes 2m 20s from the grub menu to displaying booting activity. In the 2m 20s period the screen is blank. Also this is the same regardless of booting Z16 or Z17.
I am asking for suggestions to help me determine where the problem lies:
Can I get additional debug on the screen during the blank screen period.
to see a layout of what is causing boot to clog up. Please take No Action based on that output right away, since removing certain entries can be destructive.
Analyzing it is the first step.
Thanks d4f5409d
I need to investigate some of these services further as I don't understand why they are even running, zfs related services for example but I'm not sure how this helps?
m@m-HP-Z800-Workstation:~$ journalctl -xb does report some errors that need investigation (only the red entries listed):
Jan 09 05:25:16 m-HP-Z800-Workstation kernel: ioremap memtype_reserve failed -22
Jan 09 05:25:16 m-HP-Z800-Workstation kernel: ACPI BIOS Error (bug): Failure creating named object [_SB.PCI0._OSC.CAPD], AE_ALREADY_EXISTS (20221020/dsfield-1>
Jan 09 05:25:16 m-HP-Z800-Workstation kernel: ACPI Error: AE_ALREADY_EXISTS, CreateBufferField failure (20221020/dswload2-477)
Jan 09 05:25:16 m-HP-Z800-Workstation kernel: ACPI Error: Aborting method _SB.PCI0._OSC due to previous error (AE_ALREADY_EXISTS) (20221020/psparse-529)
Jan 09 05:25:16 m-HP-Z800-Workstation systemd-fstab-generator[357]: Failed to create unit file /run/systemd/generator/-.mount, as it already exists. Duplicate entry in /etc/fstab?
Jan 09 05:25:16 m-HP-Z800-Workstation systemd[348]: /usr/lib/systemd/system-generators/systemd-fstab-generator failed with exit status 1.
Nothing in either stands out as a cause of slowness.
Your analyze-blame output is pretty quick, actually.
The log errors show mostly minor issues that are harmless or can be ignored.
I admit I also think the problem may be the hard drive(s) but not any failures but a partitioning issue. The reason I think partitioning may be a issue is because I had extreme issues trying to install Zorin 17 along side existing Zorin 16.
> my hard is now partitioned thus:
> /dev/sdb1 primary partition format FAT32, flags: boot,
> /dev/sdb2 extended partition containing:
> /dev/sdb5 logical partition, format ext4 label Zorin 16
> /dev/sdb6 logical partition, format ext4 label Zorin 17
Could this be the issue? Its definitely not how Zorin 16 was installed with Windows 10.
The PC is an hp Z800 which is BIOS boot only by the way.
The hp Z800 has two disk interfaces one is the usual four SATA and the second is four SAS managed by a hardware disk system. The single sda disk is a SATA disk used for system and user data backups. The sdb disk is mirrored array .
$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 1.8T 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 1.3T 0 part
└─sda2 8:2 0 490.1G 0 part
sdb 8:16 0 556.9G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 512M 0 part
├─sdb2 8:18 0 1K 0 part
├─sdb5 8:21 0 176.8G 0 part
└─sdb6 8:22 0 379.7G 0 part /
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
sr1 11:1 1 1024M 0 rom
$ sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sdb: 556.93 GiB, 597998698496 bytes, 1167966208 sectors
Disk model: Logical Volume
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xccd9ccd9
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1 * 2048 1050623 1048576 512M b W95 FAT32
/dev/sdb2 1052670 1167964159 1166911490 556.4G 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 1052672 371730431 370677760 176.8G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb6 371732480 1167964159 796231680 379.7G 83 Linux
Disk /dev/sda: 1.82 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors
Disk model: WDC WD2003FYYS-0
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 91D17CA0-2D6D-11EB-A5E3-78ACC03C2C48
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 2048 2879275007 2879272960 1.3T Linux filesystem
/dev/sda2 2879275008 3907028991 1027753984 490.1G Linux filesystem
And I have just noticed something odd: Why is "Disklabel type: gpt" for /dev/sda but "Disklabel type: dos" for /dev/sdb. Perhaps its not a issue since /dev/sda is the boot disk.
I did setup sdb as msdos and I think the disk used for sda came from a NAS.
I have just completed removing the Zorin 16 partition. I also moved the Zorin 17 to a Primary partition. The partition table is now just a single partition. Doing this did not improve the boot time. Still 2mins 20 sec before boot messages an a total of 3min 38sec to login screen.
I really need to see what grub is doing when the screen is blank, the 2min 20ses period.
This spews out a huge amount of not very helpful messages. I was hoping to notice the messages pause for approximately 2 minutes but nothing was obvious. I therefore concluded booting takes a long time but I was not happy with this.
I did some reading of the initramfs docs together with global search for other similar issues. Two things popped up:
the initramfs configuration parameter MODULES, and
compiling the kernel with INSTALL_MOD_STRIP
Trying MODULES=dep reduced the size of initrd.img to 116mB from 125mB but I was hoping to bet nearer 50mB.
item 2. is a bit out of my capability so cannot take that any further. I also think that would make the install a custom setup and I don't want that.
thanks. However I would then expect to see other issues with applications loading very slowly, failing, backups failing and other issues relating to the whole disk backups but I'm not seeing that. Granted using a hard disk is a lot slower than SSD but I can live with that. No I think it the size of the initrd.img file. It appears to contain every module that has ever been written. I also use Fedora and the size of its initrd.img file is circa 45mB and boots a lot faster.