Hello. I just installed this OS and I find that programs keep freezing up randomly for several seconds at a time. It seems to happen in every program no matter what I'm doing. When it happens I can still move the mouse around, move/minimize/maximize windows, and use other open programs just fine.

When I installed the OS I kept my /home partition from the previous OS without formatting it. Could this cause the problem I'm having? Besides the home partition I have a swap partition and a 20GB root partition which I did format.

I tried booting with the live disc and using fsck. The home partition had no bad blocks, the root partition gave an error. I can't remember the exact error message but it suggested this may be a zero length partition.

I have read something about partition alignment, and doing it wrong could cause bad performance. The mint installer even warned me about this and told me to re-create the root partition, which I did.

So any ideas what could be causing this and how to fix it?

you gave almost no information. I think the exact error message would be very important to go further.... /home should be fine (as long as you kept your own user id).

It said something along the lines of, "could not read superblock. Is this a zero length partition?"

I will try again later and get the exact message.

You might be able to fix it.
Boot your Mint DVD or USB.
Enter the command: You will see that -b is the option to "Use alternative superblock" - so do (for sda1):To verify that /dev/sda1 is aligned, query it using /usr/bin/blockdev, if a '0' is returned, the partition is aligned:To check for bad blocks on /dev/sda1:To fix bad blocks on /dev/sda1 (when that is possible):

could be. could be something else.


butnot the sort of problem you're experiencing.


as was said before, more info is needed.
difficult to troubleshoot.
first, do the fsck recommended earlier.
then, try with a new $HOME by creating a new user and logging into that.