We had a similar problem. We had weird symptoms such as a logger looked like it was running away, find made the machine hang (had to use the power button on that one) but only sometimes. Turned out to be flaky RAM. As soon as we replaced it and doubled it, all was right with the world. We used http://www.memtest86.com/ for testing the RAM.
Jeanie -----Original Message----- From: et [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, July 02, 2002 2:54 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [newbie] Strange crashes when idle On Wednesday 03 July 2002 05:39 am, you wrote: > Hi all, > > I don't know if I consider myself a newbie, having run linux of some sort > for about three years, but I don't consider myself an expert, so here I > am. > > My problem is unfortunately hard to describe, and what I'm really looking > for is ideas for establishing what the problem might be. > > Basically, I installed Mandrake 8.2 a few days ago, and it's crashed once > or twice a day since then. I was tolerating it, until this morning's crash > when my root partition was damaged. Now I want to get to the bottom of it. > > When it's crashed I can see that my CPU meter is suggest a very high CPU > load (around 4 lines high on a standard xload meter). Various things lock > up, generally my web browser. I'm suspicious of mozilla/galeon at present, > but don't really know for sure. > > Eventually the whole thing dies, and I can ctrl-alt-F1 etc to get to a > shell, but if I run anything (like pine) the whole thing stops, and > eventually I can't do anything (like login from another prompt). At that > point I have to reset my computer... > > As I said, this morning the disk was damaged by this, and I had to > manually run fsck to fix it up. Annoying. > > Anyone experience similar weird problems? > > I'm going to try not running any mozilla based browsers for a while, to > see if that helps at all. I'll let you know if it does. > > Thanks for any help you can offer me! > > Pippin Barr how much memory do you have? is it shared video mem? how much disk space do you have? (type df, and post it) also type cat /proc/interrupts and let us see that. did you install (clean, format all linux partitions?) or Upgrade? try running top as the first thing when you see the slowdown. my guess is no free hard drive space (in say /etc or /var), or a lost swap file.
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