Booting is taking too long and there is an unusual hard disk activity

[upa]

Hi everyone!
I am experiencing this problem in a laptop AMD_64. After starting the boot process, an intense hard disk activity begins, the splash screen with the progress bar disappears and then it goes to console mode where the last output is:
"Activating swapfile swag... [OK]" (I understand that there is not the problem, because it says it is "OK")
then follows a high hard disk activity for a long time (one minute or more) and the next message in the console is
"mounting securityfs on /sys/kernel/security [OK]"
Then the login screen is showed.

This behavior is new, since last week, say two or three days ago. The system is up to date. Is somebody having a similar behavior? What could be causing it?

Thanks in advance.
Jorge

[Rog131]

Re: Booting is taking too long and there is an unusual hard disk activity

Are you using wubi ? There is a thread > Activating swapfile swap...Need help!!!! and a bug report:

> Hardy wait so much on "Activating swapfile swap..." on Wubi installation

[upa]

Re: Booting is taking too long and there is an unusual hard disk activity

Hi Rog131,
No. My installation comes from kubuntu 8.04, upgraded to 8.10 in Agost 2008, and it is up-to-date (It means that it has installed all suggested updates, including RC updates). It has three partitions:
/ 10Gb (+2GB free)
/home 70GB (+2GB free)
swap 2.5 GB (almost always it is free during normal operation)

Thanks,
Jorge

[Rog131]

Re: Booting is taking too long and there is an unusual hard disk activity

Does the dmesg have error messages ?. What tells (konsole) ?:

dmesg | grep swap

Links
> SwapFaq
> Topic: Swap Partition
> LinuxLogFiles

dmesg - "mother of all logs"

Upon boot, the dmesg output is from the kernel booting, showing the devices it has found and if it has been able to configure them at all (aside from userland configuration). This log is also available in the file /var/log/dmesg.

more:
dmesg explained (http://linuxgazette.net/issue59/nazario.html)

[upa]

Re: Booting is taking too long and there is an unusual hard disk activity

dmesg | grep swap produces this output
[ 18.734633] Adding 2570392k swap on /dev/sda4. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:2570392k

Are you sure that the problem can come from swap? I pointed to the second entry about securityfs. It seems that it is looking for something or checking something to mount the securityfs. When the hard disk activity finishes the log about securityfs is written and then a lot of log more and the login screen appears.

Thanks,
Jorge

[Rog131]

Re: Booting is taking too long and there is an unusual hard disk activity

Are you sure that the problem can come from swap?

No - i was hoping that the logs would reveal useful information: warnings/errors. Something that would explain, what is happening.

That:

Adding 2570392k swap on /dev/sda4. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:2570392k

is same as here.

[Windy]

Re: Booting is taking too long and there is an unusual hard disk activity

Just a wild guess...
Is it doing a file system check (fsck) on every start-up?
It would explain the disk activity and slow start-up, if so there should be something in the log file.

[upa]

Re: Booting is taking too long and there is an unusual hard disk activity

Hi Windy, thank you for your reply.

Is it doing a file system check (fsck) on every start-up?

Yes... or No. I can see en etry about fsck in the log, but they are many lines before that where the hard disk activity starts. When this happens the only current line(s) in console are those I posted in my first post.

But today I am trying to upgrade to 9.04 (if I can sort this problem http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3103100.0 )

[upa]

Re: Booting is taking too long and there is an unusual hard disk activity

Well, it is fixed.
But only when I did a fresh install of 9.04 >