Re: diagnosing hard-locks [was memtest+ won't load]
On 7/7/06, Andrew Sackville-West <andrew@farwestbilliards.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 01:36:52PM -0400, Michael Marsh wrote:
> 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.
so IOW, don't do that? ;)
YMMV. I'm guessing it was a coincidence caused by the combination of
a 4-year-old drive and a heavy access pattern.
I haven't been using start much, but it looks pretty okay to my
untrained eyes. The disks are old though. but again, it doesn't happen
in situations where i'd be swapping. blah. its frustrating. and
unpredictable which is probably the worst part.
I'm *always* swapping on my laptop (which sounds really bad out of
context), since my 256MB of RAM is taken up almost entirely by firefox
and thunderbird. And that's before loading any pages. Once I
resurrect the thing I'll pick up a SODIMM to boost the physical RAM,
which should also make it peppier.
--
Michael A. Marsh
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh
http://mamarsh.blogspot.com
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