A Long Boot

Recently I was running into an issue with my main desktop taking a while to boot up. It would stall on a start job for the Journal Service — "A start job is running for Journal Service (xx/1m30s)" — and it would take around a minute to start and the OS finish booting. I ignored it for a while as it wasn't much of a bother, but as it continued to happen I was curious as to what was going on.. My system boots from a modern NVMe SSD and should be plenty speedy for whatever I/O ops need to happen to get the system started, so why was the Journal Service taking so long?

A quick search yielded this Arch Linux forum post (archive) describing an identical issue as mine, and I noticed the same "usb X-X: device descriptor read/64, error -110" type errors in my boot log that OP noticed! Error 110 as described in errno.h is ETIMEDOUT: Connection timed out, so it appears that some USB device is failing to communicate with the system in a timely manner. OP goes on to state that they solved their issue by unplugging all USB devices connected to the system and, checking with a boot each time, determine which device(s) were causing the error. Great! Just one problem: the problem persists for me even with no USB devices connected.... I thought maybe it could possible be one of the hubs, I know that many modern motherboards will have internally wired USB hubs for various on-board devices like system LEDs and my motherboard is one of those GamerTM boards with RGB Everything. I took a look through the UEFI settings to see if there was any options for disabling USB ports or hubs to no avail, so I decided to open up the case and take a look around — if you know anything about maintaining computers I'm sure you can guess where this is going... Fiddling with things here and there didn't really yield anything, all the connectors were still connected properly, GPU was fully seated, etc. until it came to the RAM. The first stick I pressed down on had some give to it, it wasn't fully seated in the slot. Doh! Lo and behold on the next boot after ensuring the RAM was fully seated the system started right up with no delays, the problem was solved!

As always when funky things happen and the usual troubleshooting routes lead to dead ends, try reseating your RAM.

/troubleshooting/ /linux/