Computer Diagnostics
Recently I had to restart my computer, an action which it does not do often. I was appalled to discover that my boot time had spiked to something slightly larger than 3:45!
It turns out that I have an issue with the boot sector in my tired old hard drive. When a computer boots, it’s rather like an onion – low level processes like the BIOS take stock of their surroundings, then initiate higher level processes, like GRUB and Xorg. This is kind of like an onion building itself layer by layer. A problem in the boot sector means that GRUB asks the hard drive for information on how to build the next layer, and waits for the information. GRUB gives up waiting before the drive actually produces the required data!
Ironically enough, GRUB then loads to a shell (a backup layer) and continues waiting. In order to reach Xorg I actually need to exit the shell and get GRUB to re-query the drive. Needless to say, this has caused me quite a bit of grief in the last few days – especially since I’ve finally rolled up my sleeves and upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 edition, requiring more than a few restarts before I got everything set properly.
Ubuntu (and BSD/Unix in general) has a nasty habit of badgering the user with “New Updates” every few days, something which has proven remarkably difficult to circumvent. The kernel does a good job of installing updates with the required restarts of Windows, but killing processes and the mental hassle of a repetitive, incessant task has a cumulative effect.
If anything, this does give me an opportunity to re-format my hard drive into ext3, something which I have been wanting to do for months. Somehow that’s little consolation when I know how much data I need to shovel around.
