Re: diagnosing hard-locks [was memtest+ won't load]

["Michael Marsh" <michael.a.marsh@gmail.com>]

On 7/7/06, Andrew Sackville-West <andrew@farwestbilliards.com> wrote:
> These locks are particularly frustrating as they leave no trace in the
> logs. the logs just stop until they come up from the reboot. I've seen
> it happen while I'm working maybe two or three times... just lock
> right up and be totally gone. screen looks fine, nothing responds, no
> ssh, no response to keyboard (capslock/numlock frozen) etc. Sometimes
> even the restart button on the box won't work and I'll have to force a
> shutdown with the 4-second power button press. So I have no doubts
> that its locking up tight. This is part of why I think it might be
> related to that acpi stuff as it seems to happen a lot when I'm NOT
> working at it. perhaps the bios is trying to suspend something and it
> causes a problem?

I actually had a suspiciously similar problem recently.  A couple of
times, everything just froze.  The power button was the only thing
that would respond.  memtest86+ showed no problems.  I figured it
might be a bad block in swap, so I ran the START self-diagnostics on
the drive.  The only effect that had was to do something bad to the
drive R/W head, reminding me that I really should be doing backups.

--
Michael A. Marsh
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh
http://mamarsh.blogspot.com