Re: System freezes unexpectedly
On Tue, Jul 27, 1999 at 03:29:40PM -0400, Chris Mayes wrote
> Hello, everyone. Well, I had hoped that the problem was a freak occurrence,
> but it's happening about 2-3 times a week, now. Unfortunately, there isn't
> much fanfare, no flurry of error messages. Nearly every time I've encountered
> a system freeze, the screen had been blanked, so I couldn't see the desktop.
> For the most recent time, I was actually sitting at my desk working on stuff
> when the system froze. Everything stopped. I couldn't kill the X server or
> switch consoles. The thing was totally frozen. I've checked the logs, but I
> didn't see anything special. In syslog, messages, user.log, etc., it looks
> just like normal messages until crash time with boot messages following. Does
> anyone have any suggestions for diagnosing and possibly fixing this problem?
> I am running Debian Potato (Last full update was the middle of June) on Kernel
> 2.2.6. TIA!
>
I've had similar problems with a couple of machines I've set up. In one
instance it was a bad stick of RAM (the real giveaway was when it started
occasionally not seeing one stick during the POST; the classic 'compile the
kernel a few times' test didn't spot it), and in the other (ongoing) it
looks like being a problem with an IDE drive (guess, based on the fact that
/dev/hda's activity light is always on when it stops; also, the offending
drive is in one of those awful 'slide-in' drive trays, in which I have
little confidence). I suspect that your problem is also hardware-related.
You may want to disable blanking (add a script containing 'setterm -blank 0'
to /etc/rc.boot, say) and leave the machine at a text console when you walk
away from it; that way you give yourself the best chance of seeing any
'oops' or panic that may be produced.
John P.
--
huiac@camtech.net.au
john@huiac.apana.org.au
"Oh - I - you know - my job is to fear everything." - Bill Gates in Denmark
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