[conspire] fsck "differences between boot sector and its backup"

[roger at rogerchrisman.com]

My laptop is booting faster now. Debriefing follows:

digression {
> > This is a duel boot laptop...

Firefox's inline spell checker gets credit for that pun, and you Paul
for noticing it. :-)

I keep nothing of value on this laptop's Windows partition. Only
reason it is there is to help me figure out if my hardware works
right. To access HP.com's various online bios and driver upgrade and
diagnostic tools *Internet Explorer on Windows* is required. Something
to do with the relationship between Microsoft and PC manufacturers
often leaves Linux outside. I had trouble getting this laptop's
original Intel PRO/Wireless 2100BG Network card to play with Linux. It
worked fine under Windows but I use Linux. So I replaced it with an
Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network card. That works somewhat better.
}

I have now defraged my sda1's FAT file system (Windows partition)
using Windows' own defragment tool.

I have also copied sda1's "original" boot sector to its "backup" boot
sector using Kubuntu's fsck, like this:

sudo umount /dev/sda1
sudo fsck -r /dev/sda1

By the way, fsck would not do the repair without the -r flag. Now that
the repair is done, fsck finds no trouble in sda1. However, fsck still
spends 28 seconds examining sda1 during Kubuntu boot up. Say, why am I
always mounting sda1 at Kubuntu startup? Hm.. I have had Kubuntu mount
that Windows partition automatically as "/media/10G\ Media" so I can
get at files on it, which I never do come to think of it, without
needing to remember how to mount it.

So now.. /etc/fstab
I comment out the sda1 line in /etc/fstab and reboot.. Good, now
Kubuntu does not mount sda1 at startup anymore (and understandably
fsck no longer examines sda1).

My belly button is tired.

*Weird*: Kubuntu boots in now 1 minute to KDE login screen when I
display its progress via Alt+F1 but in 3 minutes (2 whole minutes
more) to same KDE login screen when I do not display its progress. My
guess is displaying the login output to screen saves the system
spending 2 minutes trying but failing to display something else,
perhaps that nice blue Kubuntu splash page that should show up at that
part of the boot sequence before the KDE login screen but does not on
my laptop for some reason in Kubuntu 7.10. So I'll hit Alt+F1 when
booting my laptop, see the output and save 2 minutes. Alt+F1: make
laptop into time machine.

Is /etc/fstab the correct place to control what mounts at startup?


Thanks.

Roger :-)