Slow startup and ATA errors

Roken · 2013-06-30 22:06:51

I hope that this is the right place to post this, and I hope it helps others.

First, a little background. using xfce4 I found thet my desktop was taking a lot longer to load than normal (from 22 seconds from to startup to more than a minute). I also started to notice ata frozen errors cropping up to the point that I couldn't boot reliably. Usually, I would suspect HD errors, but since I've replaced all teh spinners on my system, I've pretty much eliminated that.

Now, although I use Arch almost exclusively, I still dual boot Win 7, and for the very rare times I boot Windows I have my shared drives NTFS formatted.

After a session of more than 30 minutes just trying to boot, and after having not booted Windows for more than a month, I gave in and decided to try filesystem repairs. First, I booted a live CD and fsck'd my ext4 partitions, which passed very quickly and caused no problems. Then I booted Windows with teh intention of doing a dskchk in a native environment. As it happens, Windows decided on the dskchk itself, and hell, did it find a lot of errors on the two NTFS drives, and took a hell of a long time to finish.

Nevertheless, it was a fruitful exercise. No more ata errors, and boot time has dropped to 17.1 seconds (according to systemd), and 15 seconds according to my stopwatch.

As it happens, I also have 3 DVD drives, but only one connected and one known to be bad. I swapped out the connections on the DVD drives, too, which may have helped somewhat, though this throws a red herring into the mix, in that a (potentially bad) DVD drive causes ata errors on the HDs. Nevertheless, checking apparently unrealted drives and fixing FS errors has fixed my system, and since this is a relatively common problem (at least, my searching suggested as much) I figured I'd post my success in fixing in the hope that it would help others.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-06-30 22:06:51

Slow startup and ATA errors

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