Linux Mint Forums

I've just installed a second drive in my laptop which is an SSD.
I'd like to dual/mulit boot Mint with some other 'fast booting' distro so I can get access to the web very quickly, if the machine has been shutdown.

I've installed Peppermint which boots in around 11 seconds from the grub menu.
Anyone found anything quicker?

Boo! Too slow! Linux Mint 13 boots in 6 seconds

Surprise, but once you have removed the bottleneck that caused your computer to boot horrible slow (i.e., the hard disk) you will encounter the next bottleneck. And so boot time is variable also depending on your hardware. Best bet: if you want to significantly decrease boot time, you have to significantly decrease how many bytes get loaded during boot. So have a look at the tiny Linux distro's, like Puppy? It boots in less than 2 seconds here.

Thanks ... will give Puppy a try.

6 seconds for Mint 13 is fast .... on my system it takes 15 secs ..... (/ & /home are on the SSD with links to files on hard disk in the original home directory.)
What tweaks have you made to Mint 13?

(The SSD is a Samsung 830 2.5inch SATA III 6GBps 128GB .... Samsung laptop core i5 processor, but I guess the SSD performance will be the dominant factor?)

I also recommend Puppy.

Another option is to install a light distro like AntiX, Debian LXDE, LMDE XFCE, Lubuntu, etc and remove everything you don't need. Did that for Mint 12 LXDE here.

I've not tweaked much. I did the basic SSD optimizing: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 03#p461796. I have a SATA II SSD (Intel X25-M) for /, and the Intel Core i5-2500k.

xenopeek wrote:I've not tweaked much. I did the basic SSD optimizing: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 03#p461796. I have a SATA II SSD (Intel X25-M) for /, and the Intel Core i5-2500k.

Thanks ..... I've already followed this post.

It sounds like we have similar hardware so I'm wondering if I might get more out of my system. The SSD is in a caddy in place of the DVD drive (supposed to be designed/optimised for SSD).

Which are the best packages to interrogate my system and see if I have a bottleneck somewhere .... gui based and easy to understand?
Ouput from hdparm (which does not look good??):

##########:~$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 6694 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3347.76 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 776 MB in 3.01 seconds = 258.12 MB/sec

by comparison the hard disk
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 6838 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3420.22 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 200 MB in 3.02 seconds = 66.32 MB/sec

Upon second thought, I also optimized my startup services and reduced what all gets loaded at startup: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 77#p600177

You can also investigate what all is being done during your boot with bootchart. Install bootchart to find out more: After the next boot the bootchart image is in /var/log/bootchart.

I've ran some tests from Windows 7 using the AS SSD Benchmarking software and discovered that my SSD was under performing.

I've now swapped the two disks and how have the SSD as /dev/sda with the original hard disk as /dev/sdb (in the DVD caddy). I used Super Grub2 to boot into the Windows 7 install and re-ran the tests ..... SSD is now running much faster ...... which is great

HOWEVER
I re-launched Mint 13 to rebuild Grub and have installed it to both disks (as I'm unsure which is used by the laptop to boot) .... the only issue is that the laptop will not boot .... screen just flashes .

I've tried every option I can think and even looked in the BIOS to see if there are any settings so I can select which disk the system boots from, and no such option exists. (In the days of IDE drives you had to set a jumper connection on the disk to tell the system which one to boot).

Any ideas how I can get my laptop to boot again??

Please don't cross-post the same question to multiple topics. No matter how annoying the problems are

Any other readers, please follow up on the GRUB question here: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=114231

xenopeek wrote:Please don't cross-post the same question to multiple topics. No matter how annoying the problems are

Any other readers, please follow up on the GRUB question here: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=114231

Apologies ..... thanks for the reply

xenopeek wrote:Boo! Too slow! Linux Mint 13 boots in 6 seconds

Surprise, but once you have removed the bottleneck that caused your computer to boot horrible slow (i.e., the hard disk) you will encounter the next bottleneck. And so boot time is variable also depending on your hardware. Best bet: if you want to significantly decrease boot time, you have to significantly decrease how many bytes get loaded during boot. So have a look at the tiny Linux distro's, like Puppy? It boots in less than 2 seconds here.

I've got Mint 13 down to 10 seconds now (despite using a hard disk) ..... great .

Peppermint takes 7 seconds.
I'll try crunchbang 11 once its available.

Arch Linux boots pretty darn fast from my SSD:
http://youtu.be/pQruV2U09JE
It boots about a second faster if I add "quiet" to the boot parameters.

It's not the easiest to install, but it's not too bad if you have a little Linux experience and read the documentation.