My Debian Sarge system crashes like daily (the last few days). The way it crashes is always the same: it feels as if the HD becoms inaccessible (I can switch between windows, but any command just hangs)
After a reboot, everything is fine (until next crash). I tried to diagnose the problem: 1. ran memtest86 for 15 minutes, it found no errors (I think the whole test suite may take hours) 2. ran dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null, which finished without errors 3. tried to run fsck on /home, but it doesn't do anything useful, just returns immediately, saying the file system (ext3) is "clean" 4. tried to remount / read-only to run fsck on it too, but "/ is busy", and even then it's also ext3, so fsck probably wouldn't be useful QUESTIONS: How long is memtest86 supposed to take per Gig? How to test other hardware, especially the hard drive, motherboard? How to perform useful checks on ext3? How to fsck the root partition? I can't remount it ro, because it's busy. Any ideas? This is a relatively new machine, and I ran the unmentionable OS on it for months without any problems, so HW issues seem unlikely, and I'm already trying to diagnose them the best I can (see above).
