Arch Linux

Jacek Poplawski

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2006-01-10

Posts: 736

Website

Waiting 10 seconds for device....

I have serious problem detecting hard disk during startup.
There is a message: Waiting 10 seconds for device, but it won't wait 10 seconds.
Sometimes it passes and system boots.
Sometimes it fails at that point, and I can only reboot because it's not able to mount root.
Where exactly is the script which waits 10 seconds? I can't find it in /etc at all.

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,353

Re: Waiting 10 seconds for device....

I am not an expert, but init cannot run until after root is mounted.  To answer your question, I believe it is in the kernel itself. 

Not waiting 10 seconds is an indication that the drive has been found and the boot process continued.  If the 10 seconds time out, you will be dumped (unceremoniously) into a recovery shell.  Since this is not happening, I would venture that your problem is not with mounting root, but with the early stages of init.

---

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
---
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

Jacek Poplawski

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2006-01-10

Posts: 736

Website

Re: Waiting 10 seconds for device....

Correction - I am dumped into recovery shell. There is a message "you are on your own", so that's why I think the problem is root mount.
But it never waits 10s.

siriusb

Member

From: Hungary

Registered: 2010-01-01

Posts: 422

Re: Waiting 10 seconds for device....

Just a thought, maybe you have more disks and your motherboard gives you not the same disk order all the time. I mean sda and sdb refers othe hard disks from time to time. I'd use UUID in grub config and see what happens, since it seems grub can't find root partitions. Do you have any extra with your partitions? Encryption etc. Maybe a hook is missing. Or you should just reinstall grub.

Ramses de Norre

Member

From: Leuven - Belgium

Registered: 2007-03-27

Posts: 1,289

Re: Waiting 10 seconds for device....

Correction - I am dumped into recovery shell. There is a message "you are on your own", so that's why I think the problem is root mount.
But it never waits 10s.

It only waits 10 sec if needed, it should read "waiting maximally 10 sec for root device...". If it finds the device or an unrecoverable error occurs, it wouldn't make sense to keep on waiting.

As suggested above, the problem is probably due to device nodes getting swapped. Read this article and use UUIDs or labels in fstab and grub.

Edit: typo.

Last edited by Ramses de Norre (2011-06-11 12:33:36)

Jacek Poplawski

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2006-01-10

Posts: 736

Website

Re: Waiting 10 seconds for device....

Thanks, sounds good.