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Mauli
Asked: 2009-07-21 01:41:56 +0800 CST

Grub hangs after x-2 seconds

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We have a kiosk like terminal, with a customized Ubuntu installation (customized only in that way, that only a few packages are installed, and the installation process is unattended). The thing is, on the terminal we tested, it works fine, but on the production one, grub hangs 2 seconds before it would actually boot the default kernel automatically.

The supposedly only change is, that on the test version we had, there is a hard disk, the production ones have flash drives. But that shouldn't be a problem, should it? If we hook up a keyboard, press ESC go into the grub menu, pick the default menu entry, it boots.

What could be a reason for this behaviour?

UPDATE: I think we found the bug. It seems there is a defect in the hardware. The clock doesn't work, so it seems the interrupt for the timer doesn't work as well, therefor the count down in grub doesn't work as well.

linux ubuntu grub

2 Answers

  1. Hard to help without additional info.

    Please provide:

    • the version of GRUB you are using (output of dpkg -s grub)
    • your GRUB config file (usually /boot/grub/menu.lst, /boot/grub/grub.conf or /etc/grub.conf )
    • the partition layout, both on the system where it does and where it does not work (output of fdisk -l /dev/hda , replacing /dev/hda with your boot harddisk)
    • the output of grub until the point where it hangs (should be something like "Grub loading...")

    Then we'll see...

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  2. If you are getting grub option list then press c to go to grub command prompt. On command prompt type 

    root(

    and then press 'Tab' twice for autocomplete to give you suggestions. Also boot from Live CD or by some other means please add contents of grub.conf or menu.lst file in question.

    I suspect flash disk could be named sda, sdb etc. by new versions of Linux, but grub might refer to them by hda, hdb or even worse fd0. fd1, etc. So the Tab autocomplete will tell us the device names grub is assuming and configfile will tell us the device name Linux is using. Then we can try to solve the problem

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