On Tue, Jul 27, 1999 at 03:29:40PM -0400, Chris Mayes wrote > Hello, everyone. Well, I had hoped that the problem was a freak occurrence, > but it's happening about 2-3 times a week, now. Unfortunately, there isn't > much fanfare, no flurry of error messages. Nearly every time I've > encountered > a system freeze, the screen had been blanked, so I couldn't see the desktop. > For the most recent time, I was actually sitting at my desk working on stuff > when the system froze. Everything stopped. I couldn't kill the X server or > switch consoles. The thing was totally frozen. I've checked the logs, but I > didn't see anything special. In syslog, messages, user.log, etc., it looks > just like normal messages until crash time with boot messages following. > Does > anyone have any suggestions for diagnosing and possibly fixing this problem? > I am running Debian Potato (Last full update was the middle of June) on > Kernel > 2.2.6. TIA! >
I've had similar problems with a couple of machines I've set up. In one instance it was a bad stick of RAM (the real giveaway was when it started occasionally not seeing one stick during the POST; the classic 'compile the kernel a few times' test didn't spot it), and in the other (ongoing) it looks like being a problem with an IDE drive (guess, based on the fact that /dev/hda's activity light is always on when it stops; also, the offending drive is in one of those awful 'slide-in' drive trays, in which I have little confidence). I suspect that your problem is also hardware-related. You may want to disable blanking (add a script containing 'setterm -blank 0' to /etc/rc.boot, say) and leave the machine at a text console when you walk away from it; that way you give yourself the best chance of seeing any 'oops' or panic that may be produced. John P. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Oh - I - you know - my job is to fear everything." - Bill Gates in Denmark
