4 minutes 28 seconds to boot up!

My Aspire One has recently begun taking 4 min 28 sec to boot up.
I used a timer when I booted it today and here are the times:
5 sec after I press the start button the black screen appears.
At the 10 sec mark the blue screen appears.
At the 2 min 19 sec mark the black screen re-appears.
At the 2 min 21 sec mark the blue screen re-appears.
At the 4 min 11 sec mark the screen goes blank.
At the 4 min 28 sec mark the desktop appears.
From that point on the computer works just fine.
Any ideas as to the cause?
The computer runs Limpus Linux and has the 160 GB hard drive.
I have made no hardware changes to it since its purchase.

Thanks.

 

Done any installation's lately? Installed new applications, or been tweaking the os in anyway? It's possible something got buggered up and it's just bogging the system down. Might be worth while to try and re-image it (If you have anything important, definitely back it up now while it's still booting up.).

 

I did a Live Update a few days ago (including Firefox 3, FTP Client, PDF Viewer and Text Editor) and I also installed the xfce menu on the bar at the bottom of the screen. That's it.

 

Quite possibly a hard drive problem. Are you shutting down properly?

At the beggining of the boot sequence it checks to see if it was shut down properly and if it wasn't it will do a filesystem check, then it reboots. I think they should have put a message in telling the user what is going on, but they didn't for some reason.

What is odd here, is that it seems to (from your description) be doing this twice, when it should only do this once. Which is why I think it might be a hard drive problem.

If it does this even after a normal shutdown, perhaps something got corrupted causing it not to perform the shutdown correctly, so you might want to reinstall Linpus (after backing up anything important on there). If it still does this following a normal shutdown after you have reinstalled Linpus then I would suspect there is a fault with your hard drive.

If you wish you can check up on the health of your hard drive using the command line program "smartctl" it is part of the "smartmontools" package which I think you may need to install. You should be able to find out how to use it using google, if not, just ask and I'll try to reply when I get time.

 

I had the same problem. I had WinXP running and the audio was staggered. I reinstalled XP after doing a complete format (not quick format) and the problem went away!

Sharf

 

If you're running XP, you might consider a "system restore" to an earlier date. In case you're not familiar with restore, to go to it, Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and then click on System Restore. This does NOT change or delete any files such as Word, Excel, etc. It is suppose to put the operating system back to exactly where it was on the day you elect to restore to.

I've found that sometimes this will correct a problem and sometimes it won't, but it can't hurt anything to give it a try.

 

check dmesg output for errors. Check syslog for errors.