taking infinite time to boot ..any suggestions how to avoid ...new to linux

HDD may be bad? I had the same issue after dropping my laptop.

@jirehstudios whats d solution

See if you can replace the hard drive. Or this can happen if your cd was bumped while it was getting burned. make a new cd with Linux on it, that might work.

@vivek7 Well in my case I had to replace the HDD, so it was a hardware problem. If you don't suspect it is the HDD then I'd try reinstalling Ubuntu if you haven't done that yet.

REMOVE THE BOOT SPLASH FFS!!

If you have a bootable USB stick or cd, you can boot and run fsck on your hdd.

go to your grub conf file and edit it and remove "quiet splash" part and update grub and reboot

from there you can find what's causing your boot to get stuck somewhere

ok, so, now to your problem, as others have said, mostly coz of bad sectors, you can still format/fix errors and use for few more months (I did). but entirely depends on what stage it's in. If this just started, and fixing the error using fsck didn't help, it re occurs within few weeks, then the hdd is on it's way to the junkyard

thanks @pretz its workng nw