Re: Hard Lockups can't happen (can they?)
First, if this happened when you added the hard drive, I would look at removing the hard drive and then seeing if the
problem recurs. (if removing the hard drive does solve it, read more below to see why removing the hard drive might
have fixed it)
unfortunately, you did a hardware and a software upgrade at the same time, and it could be either, or a combination of,
or even worse, something completely unrelated. (ie: original hard drive data corruption) My trouble shooting guidelines
here will focus on hardware -
is there any data on the new hard drive now? Possible it corrupted a configuration file necessary for the necessary
program to run?
Next, I would look at the hard drive causing errors on the bus. Either through misconfiguration (properly setup as a
slave drive? maybe use cable select instead, or make the hard drive master, and the optical slave)? or through a loose
cable? (reseat the ide cable on the MB, the hard drive and the optical drive) maybe you knocked the other ide cable
loose for the original hard drive in the process? (reseat it at both the hard drive and the motherboard)
maybe the hard drive itself is hosed. a bad chip on the controller board. (requiring RMA?) Use a set of hard drive
tools from the manufacturer of the hard drive to check the hard drive. For example, seatools for seagate hard drives.
seatools will check the ide controller, check the harddrive response, throroughly check the hard drive surface, and
possibly check the file system if it supports it. These tools are generally available from the hard drive manufacturers
website, and each company should have their own tool set.
Next, I would maybe look at the power supply. (we're starting to get into long shots here, but it might be worth
checking out) If you have a cheaper power supply, the extra hard drive might put just enough load to start causing
errors. Voltage drops and such due to excessive draw on the powersupply could cause bit errors in ram or on the bus,
which could lead to lockups. Check your voltages in the bios, and if you can, monitor voltages within linux.
Next, (another long shot) make sure the ram isn't corrupting data. Given the lockups occur with a specific program,
this is highly unlikely, but in the end, it never hurts to check your ram. download memtest86 (www.memtest86.org) or
memtest86+ (www.memtest.org). To run this program, you download an image, write it to floppy or cd, and then boot off
it. It will then automatically load and start running tests on your ram. To exit, hit escape and it will quit and
reboot. I would let it run for a couple passes just to make sure. Passes can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour
depending on how much ram you have, and the general speed of your comp.
next, try testing your cpu. get a program called mprime. (www.mersenne.org - mersenne prime search, more commonly
known as prime95 to those windoze people) let that program run in stress test mode for a while and see if it gets any
errors. This will do a few things for you. Check ram, check cpu & bus, check power draw...
if nothing shows up from the hardware at that point, I'd maybe move over to software. try:
$dpkg-reconfigure konqueror
or remove konqueror entirely and reinstall
Either of those options might fix/rewrite a corrupted config file. or it's possible that upgrading konqueror, as
opposed to installing from scratch causes errors. (maybe leaves old files lying around which cause errors)
moving along with software, it's possible that the upgrade affected xfree86. you might want to venture into fixing that.
Although just a warning, I don't want to see you try fixing it and causing any further damage. xfree86 can be finicky
at times...
well, that's all I can think of off the top of my head. Hopefully one of these things will help fix it. To do
everything I've mentioned here will take a while...
-doug
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ron Johnson" <ron.l.johnson@cox.net>
To: "Debian-User" <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 27, 2005 9:09 AM
Subject: Re: Hard Lockups can't happen (can they?)
Reply to: