[xubuntu-users] harddisk failure, or Xubuntu refuses to load

[Liviu Andronic]

Hello
Thank you for the explanations. Please read below.


On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 7:17 PM, Joshua O'Leary
<joshua.oleary at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Although gdm fails to load,
>
It doesn't really fail, though it takes forever. X can start but it is
very, very slow. And after I enter the login credentials, I'm simply
not waiting for it to finish - it takes too long.


> can you still login to a tty, and start xorg the
> traditional way by issuing the 'startx' command? You could also force a
>
Fortunately I can  login to a tty and thus obtain all the relevant
logs. But there is no need to 'startx' (see above).


> single fsck check on the next boot, by running touch /forcefsck. Also, it
>
I will try this tomorrow.


> would be worth seeing if booting into single user mode is any faster - add
> the 'single' option at the end of grub's boot command line, after 'quite
> splash'.
>
I checked 'edit' in grub and it seems to me that the 'kernel
(recovery)' option, or whatever it's called, and it contains 'ro
single', so I guess I already tried it. But it doesn't help. So far my
best option is to load the 'server' kernel which is already installed;
then quickly enough I can get to a tty.


> Your log also seems to mention that you have hard disks in a raid
> array - "raid6: sse2x4    3968 MB/s" - if so, does the system boot up
> properly if you use just one hard disk?
>
I am not sure what RAID is, so if I have it I didn't configure it
intentionally. I only have a SATA hard drive, on which I have a
logical /dev/sda3 partition which contains /dev/sda5 for /boot,
/dev/sda6 for / (root) and /dev/sda8 for /home. I always use a single
harddrive to boot.


> Giving the output of smartctl --all
> /dev/sda may also be useful, to examine the state of your hard drive,
> although it does rely on the smartmontools package being installed.
>
Please see the output attached. Should I run a more in depth SMART
test on the disks?

Regards
Liviu
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