How can I see what happens during the boot process?

Question

On my machine booting takes more than a minute which is annoying when I see that Windows 7 boots in 20 seconds.

Here is what I get when the machine is booting.

Picture of screen

How can I see what happens when booting up?

Have you got proprietary drivers installed? That could explain the lack of a graphical boot. It doesn't explain the slowness. — dv3500ea, Oct 30 '10 at 23:16

score 24 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 12 '22 at 04:37

24

Open Grub by holding Left Shift on boot
Edit the top option by pressing e
Search the boot command until you see the two words "quiet splash".
Delete these from that line and press Control+X to boot.

This will show you what's happening behind the scenes (and what it's getting stuck on).

This is temporary. It will revert to the old behaviour on the next boot so it's fairly safe.

If you want to make it permanent, edit /etc/default/grub as root, delete "quiet splash" from the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT variable, save and then run sudo update-grub.

edited Dec 12 '22 at 04:37

NotTheDr01ds

17,888

answered Oct 30 '10 at 23:19

Oli

293,335

3

Just to complete: at Natty, you should remove "vt.handoff=7" also. – desgua Apr 08 '11 at 03:00

score 16 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 18 '21 at 08:04

16

You can also use a program called Bootchart (click to install: bootchart and pybootchartgui) to plot a diagram of everything that's happening while booting. It will point out where most time is spent and whether there is anything seriously wrong.

This is what a typical bootchart looks like.

edited Dec 18 '21 at 08:04

karel

114,770

answered Oct 30 '10 at 23:53

Stefano Palazzo

86,783

1

Link has gone bad :( Here's a fresh one: http://www.bootchart.org/images/bootchart.debian.mcrae.0.png – bukzor Nov 29 '13 at 23:56
Nowadays (23.04), use systemd-bootchart -o bootchart.svg instead. – Twonky Mar 02 '24 at 20:35

How can I see what happens during the boot process?

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