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Last evening I encountered a problem with my primary MythTV backend server which caused me great anxiety. Fortunately, it all ended well. In hopes that I will retain the knowledge, and possibly help others, I'll share what happened. The Problem
After a reboot the server would seemingly freeze roughly one-quarter of the way through its boot process. The boot process was entirely graphical, hiding the actual specifics of what was loading, so I couldn't tell what was causing the freeze.
Hoping the problem was caused by a loading issue or some minor problem, I let the machine sit—booting—for 15 minutes. No luck. Reboot after reboot (forcibly done using the hardware reset button) did not help. I considered the fact that I had just applied many software updates, installed a new kernel and changed my VNC settings. Maybe the problem was settings-related… Using the menu in GRUB to boot to older, known-good kernels didn't help at all. I needed to see what was failing. I began searching for items related to disabling quiet boot or hiding the splash screen at startup. Everything I found (out of 20+ pages and forum posts) was either unhelpful or required actually being able to get into the system. Obviously that was out of the picture. Hope
So, after rebooting many times I tried both CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE and CTRL-ALT-DELETE while it was "frozen." To my astonishment, the boot process resumed. However, once Gnome loaded I discovered it hadn't mounted my data drives. I immediately suspected there was a problem with the drives themselves and did some searching about how to use the FSCK command to scan the disks. Eventually it became apparent that I needed to scan the disks at startup. After entering a couple terminal commands to have a "routine" check completed on next boot I kept looking for a way to boot quietly. I finally found a page that indicated you could edit the GRUB commands before startup. The Resolution
I finally rebooted and called up the GRUB menu. I selected the most recent kernel and hit 'e' to edit. I deleted the "QUIET" line and removed "QUIET SPLASH" from the main entry. Finally, I pressed "B" (if I remember correctly) to boot with the new settings. The server began to boot and I saw each item get loaded. I finally discovered the hangup. The freeze occurred during a disk scan! That was the problem all along, but it just never told me that a disk scan was in progress. I let the scan progress for roughly 45 minutes and the server came up perfectly. Sometimes it just takes patience. Maybe I'll remember that next time. |
Linux / Ubuntu / Open-Source 
