how to disable 'scanning btrfs filesystem' at system startup

After upgrading from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 14.04, 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.

I tried to :

  1. blacklist the brtfs module in /etc/modprobe.d
  2. remove btrfs-tools
  3. renamed the executable /sbin/btrfs to p.e /sbin/btrfs.save

Now i get a blank screen for about 15 seconds until the splash screen appears.


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.


On my system it is not the btrfs-scan which is causing the system to hang at boot. Instead there is a background-process trying to figure out where to find the swap-partition. My system has a SSD and plenty of RAM so it has no swap. This causes the background-process which is looking for a swap-partition to run into the void.

To change this, you can do the following:

  1. In the file /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume change the statement RESUME=... into RESUME=none

  2. After this update initramfs: sudo update-initramfs -ukall