Re: System locked and now complains at startup about modules
:: On Fri, 4 Aug 2000 20:21:42 -0700 (PDT), "nate@firetrail.com" <nate@firetrail.com> said:
Hello Nate. Thanks a lot for replying.
Here are the specs:
Pentium II 400 Mhz,
Motherboard DFI PA61 ATX (VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset - 693/596b)
(Absolutely nothing on-board)
Award BIOS
64 Mb RAM (no ECC...)
Video Card Diamond SpeedStar A50 (SiS 6326 AGP, not on-board)
HD: Western Digital Caviar, 13.5 Gb, 7200 RPM
With stable kernels, I use ATA/33
With unstable kernels, I managed to get a patch to use ATA/66.
(I still didn't completely rule out ATA66, but... The system locked
with a stable kernel (and hence, with ATA33)
BTW, I have checked to see if I could find anything related to
problems with this chipset and HD, but found nothing.
> pelleg >To see what could be the problem, I left the system with xmms running
> pelleg >while I was out for 4 hours. When I came back, the keyboard was
> pelleg >non-functionl, and nothing worked... Since it's a standalone box, I
> pelleg >hadto reset it. I was sort of expecting this (I was actually trying to
> pelleg >rule out some applications that could be locking the system)
> best thing to rule out first is X windows, disable X from starting:
> if you run X from a login screen like KDM/GDM/XDM remove the link:
No, I use startx...
> pelleg >What could be happening? (I mean, why would it just ignore the
> pelleg >comments and treat them like listed modules to be loaded?)
> I can't imagine a reason why it would, something else may be wrong, but
> the end result is harmless.
Hm, waht about the fact that it only happened after this lock? I
thought that perhaps this could mean filesystem corruption...
> pelleg >I really don't understand what's going on... I suspected that my
> pelleg >memory could be bad, but I've compiled lots of big packages (including
> pelleg >several kernels, sometimes every two days), for months and never got a
> pelleg >sig11.
> check the kernel log /var/log/kern.log if the kernel encounters an error
> it will be reported there, assuming it is not a serious hardware problem
> which causes the machine to freeze before the kernel can report anything.
Nothing there... Actually, it jumps from Aug, 4 to Aug, 21:50 (when I
resetted the machine). And the messages begin with the new
boot... Nothing in the period in which it crashed.
> pelleg >I'm beginning to suspect this may be:
> pelleg >
> pelleg >- PS/2 mouse (these locks began to happen after I got a new mouse)
> what brand/model of mouse?
I got it from a cousin... It's a "Leadership" mouse, made in China.
Ordinary 3-button PS/2 mouse, it seems...
> and what kind of mainboard? i had serious PS/2
> trouble on an old AOpen AP5T-3, after a few months the PS/2 port worked
> intermittantly(sp) maybe one out of 10 boots and even then would cause
> random crashes, eventually i just moved to a serial mouse.(that
> motherboard is still in service after 3 years it currently runs
> mandrake7.0 and acts solely as a TV for my bedroom)
Hmmm... Maybe I should get a serial mouse...
> pelleg >- X 3.3.6 (no problems happened with X 4)
> pelleg >- video card (SiS 6326 AGP)
> what video mode are you running in?
1280x1240. I've been using this mode, with this card... For months!
> and are you using a framebuffer X server?
I believe there is no support to that for this card yet...
> again i would reccomend not running X to see if X has something to
> do with it, X can be a very good center place for lockups.
Hm, just now I realize... I use flwm as a window manager (fast, small,
and not configurable at all).
I did compile it myself here (and I think I tried to include some
compiler options to optimize it a little bit, like
--arch=pentiumpro)... And packaged. Now I've reverted to the .deb I
had before...
But could this be a problem? I mean... Building the package myself? I
was confident that the same package compiled by the mantainer could be
compiled here... You know... We can even do that automatically with
apt-get... :-)
> if you run X, i would also suggest redirecting the output to a logfile,
> when you login run:
> startx >&X.log
> all output will be saved to X.log, if there is a crash check it to see if
> any helpful info is available.
Right...
I forgot to do that, but will next time.
> pelleg >Next thing I'll do is to compile X 4.0.1 and see if the problem goes
> pelleg >away. If it does, then (and I'd be surprised) it'd be an X-3.3.6
> pelleg >problem...
> is it onboard video? if so do you have another video card to try? i
> wouldnt reccomend going to XF86 4.0.1 if you can avoid it its likely to be
> more buggy then XF86 3.3.6 for that video card(but i could be wrong)
Actually, I did use 4.0.1 for a few days, and it didn't crash... But
it may have been too little time.
(I thought this could be a reasonable option, since the code is a lot
different from that of 3.3.6)
> hope this helps!
Yes, that helped a lot already.
> nate
J.
--
Jeronimo Pellegrini
Institute of Computing - Unicamp - Brazil
http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~jeronimo
mailto:jeronimo@ic.unicamp.br mailto:pellegrini@iname.com
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