Comment 3 for bug 559761

A time-out issue may be causing this. My disk has a mixture of ext3 and ext4 partitions, with one of the ext3 partitions at 91% capacity. This causes fsck to take a long time. Below is the relevant portion of '$ df -h'. I'm also attaching a copy of my '/etc/fstab', in case this helps in resolving the issue:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 12G 6.5G 4.8G 58% / (Ext4)
/dev/sda1 122M 66M 50M 57% /boot (Ext3)
/dev/sda5 15G 14G 1.4G 91% /root/snapshot (Ext3)
/dev/sda2 63G 44G 19G 71% /home (Ext4)

In response to fejes:

> In my case, Plymouth comes up, and tells me that it will check all the
> disks, but then halts at 90% or 8%

I normally boot without the Plymouth splash screen (i.e. I've appended 'nosplash' to the boot options in grub). However, I've just tried booting with the splash screen. The progress indicator changes intermittently over the course of the disk check, rather than advance at a constant rate. For example, it will quickly advance to 30%, then pause for a minute before advancing again. For the record, my boot times from grub to the kdm logon screen are:
Normal, no fsck: 35 seconds
File /forcefsck exists: 8 minutes

The presence or absence of a splash screen doesn't significantly alter these times.

> If I press escape, I get several screens full of "udevd[xxx]: SYSFS{}=
> will be removed in a future udev version, please use ATTR{}= to match
> the event device, or ATTRS= to match a parent device, in
> /etc/udev/rules.d/65-libmatp.rules:89" or variations upon that theme.

I don't see these messages, and grep fails to find the 'SYSFS' string in either /etc/udev/rules.d/* or /lib/udev/rules.d/*

> Often I also get a "ureadahead-other main process terminated with status
> 4" message or two

This is the normal exit status when ureadahead doesn't need to read any data on a given partition. See comment at http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8998483&postcount=1