On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 10:59:58AM +0200, Federico Giannici wrote:
[...]
> The pc freezes (but only occasionally) during dumps of the entire
> filesystem, using the system "dump" program. The dump is done while the
> system is in use, so files may change during the dump.
>
> Yesterday another PC freezed!
> I noticed that it occurred just at the time that a copy of a directory
> was done, this time by means of the "tar" program. This time too the
> backed-up files were in use and probably written.
What else is running? What's mounted?
I ask, because I can remember some problems with heavy IO...
- on mounted ext2fs filesystems
- on nullfs-based mounts (doesn't apply to 3.9, of course)
- with large writes to external el-cheapo disks attached to USB,
allthough this tends to toast the disk, not the system
Ciao,
Kili
ps: as somebody else wrote, fishy power supplies are a common (and
hard to debug) cause of failure, too.
