Home / ubuntu / Questions / 42351
Accepted
egarcia
Asked: 2011-05-13 13:51:02 +0800 CST

System doesn't boot unless I hit enter

  • 772

I'm trying to remove a ~40 seconds pause that happens when my Ubuntu machine starts.

During this pause, all I see is a magenta rectangle (approx 80% of screen size) over a black background.

The gap is clearly visible on my bootchart (not using an IMG tag here because the image is too high):

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18558160/syrius-natty-20110512-1.png

I also see a gap on my syslog. It seems to be related with the "video device" (I've got an NVIDIA).

...
May 12 23:15:14 syrius kernel: [    1.544436] TCP reno registered
May 12 23:15:14 syrius kernel: [    1.544447] UDP hash table entries: 4096 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
May 12 23:15:14 syrius kernel: [    1.544491] UDP-Lite hash table entries: 4096 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
May 12 23:15:14 syrius kernel: [    1.544593] NET: Registered protocol family 1
May 12 23:15:14 syrius kernel: [   42.870179] pci 0000:06:00.0: Boot video device
May 12 23:15:14 syrius kernel: [   42.870222] PCI: CLS 64 bytes, default 64
May 12 23:15:14 syrius kernel: [   42.871588] PCI-DMA: Disabling AGP.
May 12 23:15:14 syrius kernel: [   42.871697] PCI-DMA: aperture base @ c4000000 size 65536 KB

What can I do to fix this? It didn't happen on Ubuntu 10.10.

I've done some more tests. It seems that the boot sequence requires some sort of input while booting (?) It turns out that it'll not boot until I press enter (the magenta rectangle stays in the screen forever unless you press enter)

Any ideas? Thanks!

11.04

4 Answers

  1. Or press e when you see the grub boot message, go to the line that starts with "linux", cursor to the end of the line and delete "splash" and "quiet", then Ctrl-X to continue the boot process. This will allow you to see what is happening during boot. Good luck!

    • 1

  2. try editing you /lib/plymouth/themes/"your current theme"/mdv.script and make sure the background is set to a "Z" value of negative 1000 just in case it is blocking a password prompt box or something.

    that part is usually at the beginning if the script where the image is loaded

    background.sprite = SpriteNew();
background.sprite.SetImage(background.image);
background.sprite.SetPosition(Window.GetX(), Window.GetY(), -1000);

    you can also check if the prompt box has an opacity of 0 making it invisible if that is the case change it to 1 and after you are done with editing the plymouth theme do a sudo update-initramfs -u

    • 1

  3. I had a similar issue on a Fedora box I was using, turned out to be a Samba mount that I added to my fstab but forgot to add a password, so it was waiting for me to enter a password before finishing the boot.

    You can always try pressing ESC to see what's being output behind the rectangle?

    • 0
  4. Best Answer

    I've noticed that since last week (around 2011-07-11 / 2011-07-16) an update seems to have fixed this issue. My computer "timeout" has been automatically reduced from 150 seconds to 5. It's still visible, but it isn't an issue any more.

    I'm closing down this question.

    • 0