# grub is really veeeeery slow to appear

## castor_fou

Idon't have any problem with grub configuration.

However the grub screen is very slow to appear (around 1 min, 1min30 after the first message Grub 1.5 Loading...)

and I don't know why.

I don't have any other complaint about grub, my kernels are always booting correctly. Maybe my hard drive is a little bit deffective because with the previous one I  never got this behaviour.

Anyone with the same (little) issue ?

My grub.conf :

```
[root@gui - 23:20:54 - ~] # cat files_2_save/grub.conf

default 0

timeout 30

splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title=Gentoo Linux (2.6.15-r1)

  root (hd0,0)

  kernel /boot/bzimage-2.6.15-gentoo-r1_quat root=/dev/hda4

```

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## przemos

I've got similar problem but in my case main screen of grub appear only sometimes after that long time. I think that the solve of this problem is connected with disk but I'm not absolutely sure.

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## castor_fou

yeah I think it is due to my hard drive. too bad.

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## caslca

Did you guys find a solution for this? I have just installed a SiliconeImage ATA133 expansion card (no raid setup - just plain drives attached to it). I have started experiencing the same problem right after the install. Removing the card removes the lag.

I am able to boot fine and trhere are no errors in kernel log, also no visible problems.

I've tried reinstalling grub to the mbr while the card was attached but that didn't help. 

ALso, the boot disk is NOT attached to the card - it is attached to the mobo

my setup:

Nforce4

amd3500

(~amd64)

2 PATA drives attached as master/slave on primary MOBO port

LiteOn DVD burner attached as master to secondary MOBO PATA port

1 SATA disk attached to mobo

2 PATA drives attached to the expansion card.

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## castor_fou

I could not help you, in my case it was due to a conflict between my scsi card and my ide hdd. I removed the scsi cards and hdd, and now all is working fine very quickly.

sorry

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## rafo

I wish to join the club. I have a vintage machine (1996, Dell Optiplex, 166 MHz) with two disks. It boots from the small disk, and the big (300GB) disk is connected via a PCI adapter (Silicon Image PCI0680 Ultra ATA-133 Host Controller). Just as described by caslca, the two first grub printouts take about one minute each to appear. Reinstalling grub did not help.

No suspicious messages at boot time, only these long delays.

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## modified_bessel

I have had similar problems since getting a new box with twin sata drives, etc, etc.  The main grub screen was ALWAYS slow in coming up (10 - 15 seconds) as compared on earlier boxes.  Yesterday, I burned a couple of CD's on my primary IDE ATAPI CD rom, and last night, I left a blank CD in the drive.  Today, it took about 1 - 1.5 minutes for the main grub screen to appear!  What a nice hint!

Go to BIOS setup, Boot device screen.  Make sure the CD / DVD whatever removable drive is NOT the FIRST boot device; make it second or third or whatever. Then make your first boot device the hard disk where grub is installed.

Now everything is nice and fast again!  The BIOS (slowly) polls out the boot devices sequentially, and if your grub-containing bootable hard drive ain't the first, then expect a long wait while the BIOS does its retries...!  If you do like I did and leave an un-bootable CD in the first boot device, then expect a VERY long wait!

Good luck!

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## mpicklesimer

I've seen (and fixed) this problem in the past. My fix was to change from specifying Master/Slave on the boot drives to using Cable Select. My understanding is that it's certain combinations of different hard drives and motherboards. Certain Western Digital drives will take in excess 5 minutes to load the Grub menu on some nVidia motherboards. After switching to CS, Grub loads in about half a second. Could you guys post more details about your mobo/hdd combinations and let me know if this helps you? Thanks.

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## Sequentious

I have a similar problem. 

My boot order is HDD first (My bios allows me to hit F8 or something to manually select if I ever need boot from CD). The drive itself is SATA (so no master/slave/cable-select jumper) on an Intel ICH8 (The non-ahci version). 

My wait times are nowhere near as extreme as those above, but it does take an unusually lengthy amount of time -- about five to ten seconds for the first grub message to appear, another five seconds for a grub status message (I think it is something about loading "stage 1.5". I am at work currently...). When the menu appears, the cursor keys are very noticeably sluggish.

I have not worried too much about it as it all works, and the machine once past grub is speedy. It is just annoying that any boot speed advantages my new system has is negated by grub to the point that my older system "appears" to boot faster -- real time is within a few seconds, but grub really makes the system appear to take longer. 

As I said, it all works, so it is not an issue, but since I saw a thread already existing, it would be nice to see if anybody can figure out what is going on.

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## przemos

 *Sequentious wrote:*   

> 
> 
> As I said, it all works, so it is not an issue, but since I saw a thread already existing, it would be nice to see if anybody can figure out what is going on.

 

It's also works for me but sometimes it really annoys me because I have to wait a bit longer. Sometimes I consider about migrating to lilo.

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## Sequentious

 *przemos wrote:*   

>  *Sequentious wrote:*   
> 
> As I said, it all works, so it is not an issue, but since I saw a thread already existing, it would be nice to see if anybody can figure out what is going on. 
> 
> It's also works for me but sometimes it really annoys me because I have to wait a bit longer. Sometimes I consider about migrating to lilo.

 This issue is for my desktop, but my laptop is an Apple Macbook. I really hated having to re-run lilo all the time, especially for the odd time I would forget and my machine would not boot.

That was of course exacerbated by the fact that it was a Macbook, and I was updating my kernel fairly regularly for better hardware support...

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## nelchael

 *Sequentious wrote:*   

> I have a similar problem.

 

Did you upgrade grub lately? I have that problem after upgrade.

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## eccerr0r

most of the times I see this problem when it's trying to probe a nonexistant floppy drive, but I haven't been able to solve this on one of my machines yet -- it's only that one motherboard with no floppy attached.

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## bLUEbYTE84

 *modified_bessel wrote:*   

> I have had similar problems since getting a new box with twin sata drives, etc, etc.  The main grub screen was ALWAYS slow in coming up (10 - 15 seconds) as compared on earlier boxes.  Yesterday, I burned a couple of CD's on my primary IDE ATAPI CD rom, and last night, I left a blank CD in the drive.  Today, it took about 1 - 1.5 minutes for the main grub screen to appear!  What a nice hint!
> 
> Go to BIOS setup, Boot device screen.  Make sure the CD / DVD whatever removable drive is NOT the FIRST boot device; make it second or third or whatever. Then make your first boot device the hard disk where grub is installed.
> 
> Now everything is nice and fast again!  The BIOS (slowly) polls out the boot devices sequentially, and if your grub-containing bootable hard drive ain't the first, then expect a long wait while the BIOS does its retries...!  If you do like I did and leave an un-bootable CD in the first boot device, then expect a VERY long wait!
> ...

 

Where this may be another way to have such delay, this is not the case here since Grub Loading... message is printed the BIOS booting seq. already passed.

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## nelchael

I've removed (fd0) from /boot/grub/device.map and GRUB is fast again, try it (my laptop doesn't have floppy drive at all).

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## modified_bessel

 *bLUEbYTE84 wrote:*   

>  *modified_bessel wrote:*   I have had similar problems since getting a new box with twin sata drives, etc, etc.  The main grub screen was ALWAYS slow in coming up (10 - 15 seconds) as compared on earlier boxes.  Yesterday, I burned a couple of CD's on my primary IDE ATAPI CD rom, and last night, I left a blank CD in the drive.  Today, it took about 1 - 1.5 minutes for the main grub screen to appear!  What a nice hint!
> 
> Go to BIOS setup, Boot device screen.  Make sure the CD / DVD whatever removable drive is NOT the FIRST boot device; make it second or third or whatever. Then make your first boot device the hard disk where grub is installed.
> 
> Now everything is nice and fast again!  The BIOS (slowly) polls out the boot devices sequentially, and if your grub-containing bootable hard drive ain't the first, then expect a long wait while the BIOS does its retries...!  If you do like I did and leave an un-bootable CD in the first boot device, then expect a VERY long wait!
> ...

 

This is true, of course; my problem (as well as that of several others in this thread) was the existence of a very long delay before the Loading Grub.........   message even appeared!  The solution I suggested resolved that problem (on my box)......

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## nelchael

 *nelchael wrote:*   

> I've removed (fd0) from /boot/grub/device.map and GRUB is fast again, try it (my laptop doesn't have floppy drive at all).

 

Erm.. grub is still finding fd0 upon boot - still slow.

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## egon2003

I had the same problem some time ago. Then asus released a new bios and everything was fine again.

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## modified_bessel

On two different boxes here (amd64 and i386), Gentoo-2.6.17, sys-boot/grub-0.97-r2, the following actions (as partially described in earlier posts) have helped the speed of the appearance of the grub splashscreen:

1. Get fd0 out of the System.map file

2. Disable the floppy drive interface in the BIOS. Period.

3. Make sure the primary boot drive in the BIOS is NOT a CD/DVD drive.

4. Make sure the primary boot drive in the BIOS is the hard disk where the /boot partition resides.

Now when the BIOS looks for the MBR and the bootloader, if installed in the gentoo way, there ain't many other places it will (can?) try to consult before finding the main partition (hd0,0) , (sd0,0) etc., and grub seems to load as you would expect; no delays.

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## Sixtease

Hi.

I had the same problem and it got fixed when I replaced the IDE cable connecting the disc with the motherboard.

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## nelchael

 *egon2003 wrote:*   

> I had the same problem some time ago. Then asus released a new bios and everything was fine again.

 

For laptops?

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## egon2003

 *nelchael wrote:*   

>  *egon2003 wrote:*   I had the same problem some time ago. Then asus released a new bios and everything was fine again. 
> 
> For laptops?

 

No it was for a desktop. P5LD2 Motherboard. I now use the 1503 bios and every bios before this one was slow loading grub.

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## nelchael

Grub finds fd0 upon boot (when launched as boot manager), when run from system it doesn't show fd0... any idea how to force grub to not even check for fd0 ?

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## modified_bessel

nelchael:

Again, with the floppy interface DISABLED in the bios, grub has no means to go looking for it...  I don't see in any of the logs that grub goes looking for my (non-existant) disconnected floppy interface, and the grub screen appears quite fast.

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## nelchael

 *modified_bessel wrote:*   

> Again, with the floppy interface DISABLED in the bios, grub has no means to go looking for it...  I don't see in any of the logs that grub goes looking for my (non-existant) disconnected floppy interface, and the grub screen appears quite fast.

 

I've got them disabled (set to 'None') i bios, but that doesn't stop grub finding fd0.

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## modified_bessel

I appreciate that grub must go look for the floppy, but if the bios truly has it "off" then it should be fast to bypass the probe and get onto displaying the grub splash, as on my machine......

The best way to go then apparently is to install grub with "oubliez the floppy" option:

```
grub --no-floppy
```

and that way it doesn't get installed into the initialization stages.  It appears just taking it out of device.map is not enough, according to the observations in this thread.

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## VoVaN

I've had slow grub as well in the past... since that I'm lucky lilo user for a loooong while already. Can't get the point of using Grub, lilo is and will be much quicker anyway... The lilo menu appears almost instantly (not longer then 1-2 seconds) after BIOS, so I think using lilo is a good and simple solution for all of you.

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## modified_bessel

VoVaN:

Ahhhhh!  I know what you are saying.  I am just an old advocate of grub, but it is certainly starting to show it's dark side. Where it is understood, it is dependable; when new things come along, it gets crazy!  Hmmmm! Thinking to do.......!

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## davidjneff

I put together a couple AMD Gentoo boxes and initially one had an Abit MB and a mix of IDE and SATA drives.  I ran into this exact same problem, very slow grub.  Tried all the tricks I knew including re-install no-floppy, editting the device map.  Setting a SATA or an IDE as the first bootable drive made no difference.  At times the MB seemed confused and drives I'd mark as first to boot would be no longer first to boot during a restart.  My intent was to use SATA for root and the IDE drives (setup RAID5) for data serving.  Would typically take about 3 minutes to load the grub boot screen.

I ended up putting all my SATA drives in one box, all my IDE drives in another, and the problem went away.  But it sure was annoying.

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## Paapaa

This slowness is most likely related to floppy drive. 

I have Asus P5B Deluxe. I don't have a floppy drive connected to mobo. In BIOS I have disabled the floppy drive. Grub still takes too long time to go to boot menu. If I enable floppy drive from BIOS it is fast again. So apparently GRUB is trying to search floppy (although I have told it not to...) or maybe BIOS doesn't disable it properly. Any clues how to solve this slightly annoying thing?

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## modified_bessel

davidjneff:

Well, that's close to the same thing I have seen......  new AMD box, 2 big SATA's, grub went great.  Added a couple of IDE CD/DVD drives, make one the 1st boot device (to play with OS's !), and things went SLOOOO.  Left a non-bootable CD in one drive accidentally overnight, and the next boot took 3 minutes to display ole' GrubSplash!  Removed CD, made MBR  SATA the main boot device, and all went back to normal; "fast" again.  Clear problem with SATA /IDE interaction with new drivers, interfaces, me thinks!  Thanks for the extra input.

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## modified_bessel

Paapaa:

Sort of what I think.  Supposedly

```
grub --no-floppy
```

stops the floppy search, period, from the grub side.  It works like that on ~x86, for sure.

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## Paapaa

IIRC I already tried that but I'll give it one more shot. I'll report back when I get to my computer.

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## nelchael

Ok, I think I'm making some progress now - if I reboot my machine grub still finds the fd0, but it's fast. Using suspend2 - it's slow probably grub doesn't like the changes that suspend2 makes to swap partition.

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## modified_bessel

Major grub - lilo difference:

Remember that with lilo, you have to re-install after a kernel change; grub, just add the new kernel in grub.conf; no re-install of grub necessary.

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## VoVaN

 *modified_bessel wrote:*   

> Major grub - lilo difference:
> 
> Remember that with lilo, you have to re-install after a kernel change; grub, just add the new kernel in grub.conf; no re-install of grub necessary.

 

I agree with that, but it's up to you: wait every boot for grub to appear or type lilo (takes a couple of seconds) after installing a new kernel. I'd preffer the second option....

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## modified_bessel

Pretty good point.........!!!

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