Problems booting gentoo - system comes online after 30mins

noitcelfer82 · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2008 Posts: 3 Location: Clinton, IA

I'm a complete newbie, so if this belongs elsewhere or if there's some wiki-topic on this or spelled out clearly in the Gentoo Handbook you guys know what to do ...

I actually did manage to fumble my way through the entire install process, so I feel *almost* special enough to tackle this:

My Gentoo system was booting fine about a week ago but now it takes about 30 to 45 minutes to boot up. It goes through a *very* long series of errors that I can't remember because I now leave the system running and wouldn't even begin to know where to look for the logs possibly made by them. It is so perplexing to me because once I do get into KDM and KDE, everything seems to run fine. System seems to run a little slower than usual but otherwise I can do everything I could before.

I had one of those power outages where it flashes on and off about five times before going completely dead the night before this started happening but immediately after the power came back on I booted the system up and it was normal. Next boot is when the problems started.

I guess, I need help on where to look for what the problem really is or what to try first.
_________________
I'm a complete n00b, so it's fine to slap me around. It's like when the lady at the roulette table yells at me for placing my bet after the ball has already fallen.

zyko · Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 8:40 am Post subject:

Welcome to Gentoo!

It's impossible to pinpoint the problem without knowing what the error messages actually say.

I would advise you to backup important data and then run fsck on all filesystems. Do you know how to do that properly?

By the way, there is a striking discordance between the title of this thread and the content of your support request. Changing the title to something related to your problem might attract helpful users

noitcelfer82 · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2008 Posts: 3 Location: Clinton, IA

Thank you, I was originally just going to ask about recompiling the kernel because I knew I didn't have enough info to pinpoint the problem and I figured at least I'd learn something new either way! LOL.

I am going to poke around, I'm sure it's probably sad that I don't know what fsck is!!
_________________
I'm a complete n00b, so it's fine to slap me around. It's like when the lady at the roulette table yells at me for placing my bet after the ball has already fallen.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 4:15 pm Post subject:

noitcelfer82,

There may be useful information in dmesg. That command shoous the kernel log.
Depending on your setup, the logs in /var/log may show something too.

Don't be in too much of a hurry to use fsck. It can make a bad situation worse, so be sure you have everything valuable off the install before you permit fsck to write to the filesystems.

Error message text is fairly essential in providing sound advice, so if you can't spot anything in your logs, you will need to reboot.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

noitcelfer82 · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2008 Posts: 3 Location: Clinton, IA

I think the output of dmesg actually does look similar to the errors I was seeing during boot. I don't know which part is pertinent though and the log is very long. The messages look about the same all the way down, so I'm just posting the end.

zyko · Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 5:10 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 5:31 pm Post subject:

noitcelfer82,

There are several nasty things in there.

Mad Merlin · Veteran Joined: 09 May 2005 Posts: 1155