How to get rid of the “scanning for btrfs file systems” at start-up?

Question

After upgrading from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 12.10, I get a message "scanning for btrfs file systems" at starting-up. I don't have any BTRFS filesystem. It delays the booting for about 15 seconds.

How can I get rid of this?

Answer 1

The btrfs-tools package adds an action to the initramfs to load the btrfs module. If you purge that package (sudo apt-get purge btrfs-tools), followed by an update-initramfs -ukall if the uninstallation doesn't do it already, that should go away (though I've not tested it). If it doesn't, you can always blacklist the brtfs module in /etc/modprobe.d.

Answer 2

It is the btrfs kernel module that does the scanning (for filesystems scanning multiple devices).

I have not found an indication that this is configurable, so your only options seems to be removing that module from your kernel (modprobe -r btrfs) assuming your kernel supports that.

Answer 3

The script which starts the search looks for the existence of btrfs. Simply renaming the executable /sbin/btrfs to p.e /sbin/btrfs.save (as sudo) will eliminate the search , gaining some 10-20 seconds in the boot-process!

Answer 4

Btrfs isn’t too much stable to be used as deafult file-system. Most Linux distributions, probable all, are still using ext4 as primary file-system. So, you can completely remove it from your computer. Try the given command:

sudo apt-get purge btrfs-tools

This command will remove btrfs-tools from your computer. You may need to wait some minutes to complete the process. Your initramfs should be updated automatically but if not happen, do it by this command:

sudo update-initramfs -ukall

Then make a grub update:

sudo update-grub

All is well. Now make a restart. Hope your Ubuntu will start successfully this time.

Reference: http://www.ugcoder.com/disable-scanning-for-btrfs-file-systems-in-ubuntu/

Let me know if you have some questions still.