Comment 69 for bug 484677

Gabe (post #64), thank you for finally clarifying what one should do when one finds this page. Your instructions should be moved to the top of the post for all of us average users of Ubuntu who find this page via Google. That is the primary reason why I am posting at this duplicate page.

The second reason I am posting here is because this is the first page that shows up when I Google "init: ureadahead main process terminated with status 5", and Scott James remnant's behavior on this page deserves some scolding. He seems arrogantly dismissive of anyone who is not a thoroughly experienced *nix user, and therefore he does not belong in the Ubuntu community. His snobbish dismissal of other peoples' confusion does not belong in a distro intended for busy people trying to get other work done, people who are puzzled by weird messages when they boot. Thank you Ernst (post #55) for finally including the Bug number of the problem that Scott repeatedly alluded to without actually helping us.

Indeed, the ureadahead warning message may not be related to boot problems. However, if the boot failure happens shortly after the prompt occurs, it is the last thing users will see on-screen, and thus we will suspect that it has something to do with boot failure, simply because some process posted it to the screen before the boot process hangs. So us normal users should be advised to look elsewhere, as Gabe has finally done.

This ureadahead error message emerged for me with the update to 10.10. I will chase it down at https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/522197, and hope that the older fixes are still relevant. For other, mortal users, here is another thing that may help: on my netbook, certain processes will stop and wait unless there is some mouse or keyboard input. I have found that the safest input to get things booting again is to press the <shift> key; wiggling the mouse or touching the trackpad may cause the cursor to freeze once the desktop manager loads up (GDM, at least).