Slow boot after moving to new, faster SSD

spawnsworth · 1 February 2023 16:48

Hi all,

I moved my ZorinOS 16.2 installation to a new SSD then reinstalled from scratch. First thing I did was install timeshift and schedule snapshots. After a couple of days of rebuilding Zorin, I messed something up and had to restore one of the new timeshift backups.

After this, I noticed the the boot up sequence is much slower than I expected on a new, much faster SSD.

During slow boot, I pressed CTRL + ALT + A after booting, I can see what is going on. There are a couple of issues that appear to be problematic.

The main issues appears during boot whilst watching the live boot log output. I can see "a start job is running for dev-disk-by uuid* (1min 30 secs). The uuid is noted in the sections copied from /var/log/boot.log below:

[FAILED] Failed to start Show Plymouth Boot Screen.
See 'systemctl status plymouth-start.service' for details.
------------ Wed Feb 01 15:53:26 GMT 2023 ------------
[  OK  ] Finished Tell Plymouth To Write Out Runtime Data.
[FAILED] Failed to start Tell Plymouth To Write Out Runtime Data.
See 'systemctl status plymouth-read-write.service' for details.
[FAILED] Failed to start Show Plymouth Boot Screen.
See 'systemctl status plymouth-start.service' for details.
[FAILED] Failed to start Tell Plymouth To Write Out Runtime Data.
See 'systemctl status plymouth-read-write.service' for details.
[FAILED] Failed to start Show Plymouth Boot Screen.
See 'systemctl status plymouth-start.service' for details.
[  OK  ] Finished Load Kernel Module chromeos_pstore.
[  OK  ] Started Load/Save RF Kill Switch Status.
[ TIME ] Timed out waiting for device /dev/disk/by-uuid/d577b9c0-0553-4a77-b753-db204fecbdd7.
[DEPEND] Dependency failed for /dev/disk/by-uuid/d577b9c0-0553-4a77-b753-db204fecbdd7.
[DEPEND] Dependency failed for Swap.

I checked fstab and can see that the UUID is indeed the 8 GB swap partition I created (flagged as linux-swap in Gparted).

I can also see a UUID for /boot/efi which was defined during timestamp restore. I believe that was pointing at the USB device I loaded Gparted from so not sure why that is showing in fstab?

UUID=ecccce72-2095-4256-98ee-4e6bbd062756       /       ext4    errors=remount-ro       0       1
UUID=51da92c0-9b0c-4548-904e-d1f536f5df60       /boot   ext4    defaults        0       2
UUID=208F-A994  /boot/efi       vfat    umask=0077      0       1
UUID=d577b9c0-0553-4a77-b753-db204fecbdd7       none    swap    sw      0       0

I have seen these issues on forums but there are many different opinions on how best to Solve it, hence I am asking for some assistance here please

So, I have 2 issues during boot:

Can you advise if I should make changes to my fstab? If so, what changes?
Plymouth service is failing and seems directly related to Zorin. Any advice on how to resolve this? Here is the output after checking the service status:

systemctl status plymouth-start.service

● plymouth-start.service - Show Plymouth Boot Screen
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/plymouth-start.service; static; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: failed (Result: start-limit-hit) since Wed 2023-02-01 15:53:26 GMT; 51min ago
    Process: 668 ExecStart=/sbin/plymouthd --mode=boot --pid-file=/run/plymouth/pid --attach-to-session (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
    Process: 670 ExecStartPost=/bin/plymouth show-splash (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Feb 01 15:53:26 k-zorinos systemd[1]: Started Show Plymouth Boot Screen.
Feb 01 15:53:26 k-zorinos systemd[1]: plymouth-start.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Feb 01 15:53:26 k-zorinos systemd[1]: plymouth-start.service: Failed with result 'start-limit-hit'.
Feb 01 15:53:26 k-zorinos systemd[1]: Failed to start Show Plymouth Boot Screen.
Feb 01 15:53:26 k-zorinos systemd[1]: plymouth-start.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Feb 01 15:53:26 k-zorinos systemd[1]: plymouth-start.service: Failed with result 'start-limit-hit'.
Feb 01 15:53:26 k-zorinos systemd[1]: Failed to start Show Plymouth Boot Screen.
Feb 01 15:53:26 k-zorinos systemd[1]: plymouth-start.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Feb 01 15:53:26 k-zorinos systemd[1]: plymouth-start.service: Failed with result 'start-limit-hit'.
Feb 01 15:53:26 k-zorinos systemd[1]: Failed to start Show Plymouth Boot Screen.

Thank you!

Mr_Magoo · 1 February 2023 18:31

I got rid of the plymouth boot screen:
sudoedit /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="noplymouth"

Save and exit.

sudo update-grub

You might try that. The Plymouth Boot Screen process will still be borked, but if you're not using it, it won't matter, and when you next do a clean install, the problem with Plymouth Boot Screen will be fixed.

Your fstab looks alright, but it's still not 'mounting' the swap drive... are you sure you formatted it as a swap partition? The easiest way to do that is in the Disks application. Click the swap partition, click the 'gears' button, select 'Format partition', select 'Other', select 'Next', select 'Linux Swap Partition', select 'Next', select 'Format'.

Here's the fstab entries for my swap drives:
UUID=de1a46a0-1e14-4158-b93f-a94971d01683 none swap discard,noatime 0 0

UUID=8580f890-b596-4391-ac13-b727aabd50c5 none swap discard,noatime 0 0

I've put 'noatime' on all the drives, under the options heading, and disabled atime on my ZFS drives. That speeds things up a bit, as every file access doesn't have to also write out the access time.

spawnsworth · 1 February 2023 19:48

Thanks Mr_Magoo, this was very helpful!

Disabled plymouth boot via grub as suggested and no more errors on boot.

Now regarding the swap issue in fstab, I did what you said and checked the partition type in Disks utility. Sure enough it was "Linux-Swap".
Then I noticed the smoking gun...

The UUID reported in the boot.log error was:

[ TIME ] Timed out waiting for device /dev/disk/by-uuid/d577b9c0-0553-4a77-b753-db204fecbdd7

Which was found in my fstab also:

UUID=d577b9c0-0553-4a77-b753-db204fecbdd7       none    swap    sw      0       0type or paste code here

But when I checked the swap partition in "Disks" utility, I found the problem:

UUID  3cae392f-eb9f-4479-9b45-e103cc9ac98c
Partition Type  Linux Swap

The UUID has obviously changed and has not been updated in fstab. I have now manually updated the UUID in fstab so it is the same as the one seen in "Disks".

I rebooted and now Zorin boots up in under 10 seconds. It is some difference from almost 2 minutes!!

Thank you so much for the steer on this!

Mr_Magoo · 3 February 2023 12:56

That can happen if you've ever zero'd the drive, which I do weekly to my ZFS drives and swap drives so that the compressed backups are smaller (I compress the data on my 1 TB internal drive to only 2.2 GB, and the full backup of all swap drives and mirrored ZFS drives amounts to only 7.4 GB... zeros compress really well).

You can reestablish the same UUID for the swap drive like this:

Zero the swap drive:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda2 bs=512 status=progress

Set up the swap drive again with the same UUID:
sudo mkswap /dev/sda2 -U de1a46a0-1e14-4158-b93f-a94971d01683

'Mount' the swap drive:
sudo swapon -a

system · 4 May 2023 12:56

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.