Re: System crash when swithing to text-console

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 09 Aug 2011 21:46:09 +0200, Martin Lorenz wrote:

> Am 08.08.2011 17:23, schrieb Camaleón:
>> On Sun, 07 Aug 2011 13:54:09 +0200, Martin Lorenz wrote:
>> 
>> (...)
>> 
>>> The misery begins as soon as you try to switch from X to console
>>> either by Ctrl-Alt-F1 or induced by system shutdown
>>>
>>> the monitor goes black and the sysem will not react to any input not
>>> even to SysReq Keys
>> 
>> How about ssh? Can you still login via shh?
>> 
>> 
> nope
> all running ssh-sessions to that machine freeze the moment it tries to
> switch to console.
> 
> I had some tail -f's running in ssh-sessions on
> /var/log/{debug|messages|Xorg.0.log}
> All I see is the "shutdown" Broadcast message and Log-entries. Nothing
> more.

Then it can be royaly freezing (a soft kernel freeze) not just X. If you 
get no useful logs, you may need a second computer attached to one of the 
serial ports of your main system (the one that crashes) to catch 
something...

>>> after about a minute or so the system powers off and immediately on
>>> again to boot up normally (with the usual warning about HDs not having
>>> been unpountet properly)
>>>
>>> I have no idea so far as to where I should start investigating. The
>>> logs don't show any abnormality as far as I can say.
>> 
>> Maybe something related to the VGA card driver or KMS... is there
>> something interesting in the logs ("/var/log/syslog" or "/var/log/
>> Xorg.0.log")?
>> 
>> 
> No, at least nothing that seems even vaguely related to the crash.

What VGA driver are you using? Whatever it is, try to disable KMS to see 
if that makes any difference... or if you are currently running "non-KMS" 
try with the opposite :-)

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón