Greetings-- Ubuntu has been testing Grub2 for a number of months now & a "interesting" problem has surfaced. If your /boot is on a different drive than the MBR, you will have several minutes of drive use before you get to the Grub2 menu. My current timing is 3min 50sec to menu--this is with a i7-920 system with four internal drives--all SATA-II. My first bug report on Launchpad was dated 8-28-2009 & this had started a few days earlier. Before that date, Grub2 would take only 3~5 seconds to get to menu. Updates after this have not cured this issue. The current "work-around" in the bug report is to re-set MBR & /boot to the first drive. This problem only shows up in multi-boot/multi-drive systems.
During the 3+ minutes, there is constant drive activity. Colin had asked at one time for me to do a debug run which was one of the most painful times I have had in current memory--the system worked for more than 20min without going to menu & required booting with a LiveCD to repair problems from the outside. It looks like Grub2 needs to scan all the drives for all the supported filesystems several times before it "finds" the /boot that works. I will also note that I do not have any other grub installs other than my main Grub2 install, so there is only one /boot in the system. MBR is on SDA (storage drive)--I also have one install on SDB, my /boot is on SDC with a second install & two more operating systems are on SDD for a total of five operating systems (Two testing Karmic & several other installs). My thought is: Is there a way to "tag" the Grub2 /boot so time to locate is acceptable? Or is there another way to scan filesystems? Maybe a way to "tag" the type of filesystem in use? Bug report is: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/420933 With supporting information. IF you need more information or want me to do further testing, please contact me @ ubuntu1user at gmail.com Thank you for your time in this matter. -- Dean Loros autocrosser at ubuntuforums.org Performance by Design Ltd. _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
