[myksterx]

hi guys, fairly new to the forum, so please go easy on me!

ive sucessfully installed the dharma 2 to a sd card with help from some very nice users on the forum (thanks again!)

however, when booting from SD (which is the first thing in my bios boot list), it takes a couple of minutes before i see the XBMC loading screen.

is there a way of speeding it up? im sure ive seen some posts on here when people have hijacked threads, stating SD Card boot is kind of slow in comparison to Memory Stick and HDD installs.

the computer is new and just been opened out of the box, came with linux, specs are:
Acer Revo R3610
2GB RAM
160GB HDD

thank you in advance!

[Bob___]

Maybe it would boot faster if you bought a faster SD Card

[Hannes The Hun]

"a couple of minutes" sounds really slow to me, but then on the other hand, I've tried it with a live install on a 16GB SDHC card (it was a kinda fast class, don't ask me) and it also went on my nerves. I also don't think you really can gain much speed from faster cards as the limiting factors will always be the USB connection and the adapter chip in the revo.

for my former revo, I went the hard route, opened it up and installed my old 7200rpm notebook drive which already sped things up quite a lot because the factory-installed HDD is REALLY slow. for my new netbox I finally decided to go for gold and installed the small 40gig intel SSD, complete awesomeness ensued.

long story short: either you get yourself a USB stick with really good random read speeds, or open up the revo and install a good internal drive such as a small SSD. tutorials on how to cut the bitch wide open are on youtube.

[massaquah]

I encountered the same issue while using Dharma from an USB drive.

The reason for the slow boot is Grub2.

You can either switch to an internal SATA HDD or you can try to downgrade Grub.
I did the first one and this solved the problem.

[myksterx]

i have decided to install xbmc onto the internal hard drive - now its gone from taking 4minutes to boot up via SD Card to 35 seconds on the internal hard drive!

so glad i done this!

[dsmuk]

Does anyone has a guide saying how to downgrade grub?

I followed this guide but when I entered
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1298932

Code:

sudo apt-get install grub

It failed to find the package.

Any ideas?

[harryzimm]

make sure you run "sudo apt-get update" first.

cheers

[FishOil]

My live USB boots take 2 min. Thats why I dont use them.

My ZOTAC MAG takes 22 seconds power on to XBMC home screen. Internal HD install.

[Spulit]

I have this problem too. The screen shows a blinking cursor for about 10-15 seconds, then goes black for more 20 seconds, then I get the XBMC boot splash image... weird... If this grub2 thing isn't stable yet, why including it in this new XBMC release??
I'm using the official Dharma release.

[gazd25]

same problem,

I've been running the older version of xbmc from a class 4 4gb sd card plugged into the front of my revo 3610 for a long while now, it boots up in a very respectable 30 or so seconds.

I just today installed the new 10.0 xbmc release onto a class 6 (even faster) sd card and it takes around 2 minutes to boot up which is quite annoying.

I tried the process to downgrade grub, however it seems the older 0.97 version of grub doesn't want to install onto the sd card, while the new grub2 goes on just fine.

Tried the following:

'sudo grub-install /dev/sda --recheck'

also tried the below after checking the sd card is recognised as hd0 in the map file

'sudo grub-install hd0 --recheck'

these commands and various other iterations lead to the same error in each case:

'/dev/sda does not have any corresponding BIOS drive'

anybody else have any ideas, because a 2 minute boot is a deal breaker for me.

Thanks

Gareth

[gazd25]

Found a better way to deal with this, rather than try to downgrade the bits of the new 10.0 live install which aren't working I figured i'll just upgrade the bits of by 9.11 live install which are out of date by following the below procedure.

First used Winimage to take a copy of my old xbmc 9.11-live install off the old 4gb sd card (helps me because i'm moving to a new bigger card, though i'd recommend anybody performs this step pre-upgrade to allow them to rollback easily).
Dump the image on the new 8gb sd card.
Mount the sd card into my revo and use the gparted live cd with portable usb cd drive to expand the '/' ext4 partition to take advantage of the extra space (not really necessary but doesn't hurt to have it available)
Boot the revo off the 8gb card, login via putty and run the following:

(update apt cache on ubuntu install)

sudo apt-get update

(install new 10.0 xbmc)

sudo apt-get install xbmc

(upgrade recommended packages that are available)

sudo apt-get install policykit-1 parted libparted1.8-dev libparted1.8-i18n sg3-utils

Once the above was completed I basically have the same lightweight ubuntu 9.10 install I had before which boots in around 30 seconds to the xbmc interface, but running the new 10.0 release of xbmc.

I then had to install the transparency skin using the add-ons since the location of the skin in the linux file system has moved and virtually all my settings including media locations on the network, skin settings, configuration settings, video overscan etc were all as before.

Also as an extra added bonus my cheap cyberlink remote still works with all buttons, where as the 10.0 install only had limited buttons working.

hope this is of some help to others.

[Mike8913]

adjust the way the boot loader and IO schedular handle your drives. SSD doesnt get along with sequential writes which is default. Also adding "noatime" to grub will prevent the writing of access times.

I used these guides to diable access time writes, change IO schedular, and mount temp files to RAM. I ignored the other tweaks as I found them either contradictory or pointless.

guide 1
guide 2
guide 3