I have a netbook (emachine e250 - equivalent to an acer aspire one) and I have Ubunutu NBR 9.10 installed on it. Every other cold boot freezes at the following error message:

fsck from util-linux-ng 2.16

There is no disk activity, no activity what so ever. I have left the machine sit for over an hour and nothing. It takes a couple of hard resets to be able to boot properly. Once it boots everything works great (wireless, suspend/resume, etc.)!

I have spent the last couple of weeks researching the problem and the only thing that seems to work is setting nolapic in the boot string in grub - it boots every time. Unfortunately, nolapic disables the second core and causes problems with suspend resume.

At first I thought it was an fsck problem with the first partition on the hard disk as it is a hidden ntfs partition containing the windows xp recover information. So in /etc/fstab I set the partition so that it would be ignored by fsck. This didn't seem to do anything.

I have these partitions:

• /dev/sda1 - an ntfs recovery partition
• /dev/sda2 - /boot
• /dev/sda3 - swap
• /dev/sda5 - /
• /dev/sda6 - /home

I am running kernel version 2.6.31-19-generic and have all the patches (as indicated by update manager). I also have no splash screen so I can see the boot progress.

I have only been using NBR since January, I have been using Ubuntu on my desktop since last June (2009-06).

What logs should I be looking at? Is there a log for failed boots?