Splash hangs on cold boot [then error msgs] but OS loads upon restart.

**Lars۞** · November 20th, 2008

On the initial cold boot, after the unsuccessful splash loading, I get errors such as:

/dev/desk/by-uuid " " does not exist.

" " ata1.01: status: {DRDY}
" " ata1.01: exception Emask " " action frozen.

AND the eventual

Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block " "

It seems weird because this only happens on the initial boot after a shutdown - Ubuntu 8.10 loads fine after a restart..but I bet I've done something wrong..hopefully fixable. I'm guessing this is a hardware issue

I have two old ATA harddrives on a 99DellDimensionXPS-T500. I'm trying to get this old thing tricked-out to be an open source Ubuntu GIS workstation - PLEASE HELP! I've been fighting this issue for ~9 months now

here are fstab & /boot/grub/menu.lst

Code:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
# /dev/sda1
UUID=3cdbb3f5-a2b9-4210-b88d-31ed30edbd0b /               ext3    relatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /dev/sdb1
UUID=848c016b-263e-491f-90da-cd612ab940bd /srv            xfs     relatime        0       2
# /dev/sda2
UUID=7701a999-b2f1-43d9-aaff-05ea7f4f88f9 none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0

Code:

title        Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic
uuid        3cdbb3f5-a2b9-4210-b88d-31ed30edbd0b
kernel        /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=3cdbb3f5-a2b9-4210-b88d-31ed30edbd0b ro quiet splash
initrd        /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic
quiet

title        Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic (recovery mode)
uuid        3cdbb3f5-a2b9-4210-b88d-31ed30edbd0b
kernel        /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=3cdbb3f5-a2b9-4210-b88d-31ed30edbd0b ro  single
initrd        /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic

title        Ubuntu 8.10, memtest86+
uuid        3cdbb3f5-a2b9-4210-b88d-31ed30edbd0b
kernel        /boot/memtest86+.bin
quiet

**Lars۞** · December 4th, 2008

2 week bump...any help would be very much appreciated!

**Lars۞** · December 7th, 2008

A sincere and pleading bump..I desperately need some guidance - "when the student is ready the teacher appears" {?}please

**bdoe** · December 8th, 2008

Honestly, this sounds like impending hard drive failure. If you have a newer drive you don't mind reformatting, try removing your existing drives, slap the newer drive in there, install Ubuntu on that, and see how it behaves over time.

**Lars۞** · December 9th, 2008

so this is from a 1999 Dell. can i only get a few reformats on an HD before expecting hard drive failure?

**bdoe** · December 10th, 2008

Originally Posted by Lars۞

so this is from a 1999 Dell. can i only get a few reformats on an HD before expecting hard drive failure?

Getting nine years out of a hard drive is pretty darned good - consider yourself lucky it lasted this long, promptly back up all of your data, and see about replacing the drive before it fails catastrophically.